The announcement by seven MPs from the UK Labour Party on Monday that they were breaking away and creating a new parliamentary faction marked the biggest internal upheaval in a British political party in nearly 40 years, when the SDP split from Labour.

On Wednesday, they were joined by an eighth Labour MP, Joan Ryan, and three Conservative MPs. There are predictions more will follow.

With the UK teetering on the brink of crashing out of the European Union with no deal on Brexit, the founders of the so-called Independent Group made reference to their opposition to Brexit.

The chief concern cited for the split by the eight Labour MPs, however, was a supposed “anti-semitism crisis” in the party.

The breakaway faction seemingly agrees that anti-semitism has become so endemic in the party since Jeremy Corbyn became leader more than three years ago that they were left with no choice but to quit.

Corbyn, it should be noted, is the first leader of a major British party to explicitly prioritise the rights of Palestinians over Israel’s continuing belligerent occupation of the Palestinian territories.

‘Sickeningly racist’?

Luciana Berger, a Jewish MP who has highlighted what she sees as an anti-semitism problem under Corbyn, led the charge, stating at the Independent Group’s launch that she had reached “the sickening conclusion” that Labour was “institutionally racist”.

She and her allies claim she has been hounded out of the party by “anti-semitic bullying”. Berger has suffered online abuse and death threats from rightwing extremists and neo-Nazis.

In an interview with the Jewish Chronicle, the former Labour MP said the Independent Group would provide the Jewish community with a “political home that they, like much of the rest of the country, are now looking for”.

In a plea to keep the party together, deputy leader Tom Watson issued a video in which he criticised his own party for being too slow to tackle anti-semitism. He added: “Time is short for us to confront the scale of the problem and meet the consequences, to keep others from leaving”.

Ruth Smeeth, another Jewish Labour MP who may yet join a later wave of departures, was reported to have broken down in tears at a parliamentary party meeting following the split, as she called for tougher action on anti-semitism.

Two days later, as she split from Labour, Ryan accused the party of being “infected with the scourge of anti-Jewish racism”.

Hatred claims undercut

The timing of the defections was strange, occurring shortly after the Labour leadership revealed the findings of an investigation into complaints of anti-semitism in the party. These were the very complaints that MPs such as Berger have been citing as proof of the party’s “institutional racism”.

And yet, the report decisively undercut their claims – not only of endemic anti-semitism in Labour, but of any significant problem at all.

That echoed an earlier report by the Commons home affairs committee, which found there was “no reliable, empirical evidence” that Labour had more of an anti-semitism problem than any other British political party.

Nonetheless, the facts seem to be playing little or no part in influencing the anti-semitism narrative. This latest report was thus almost entirely ignored by Corbyn’s opponents and by the mainstream media.

Over the previous 10 months, 673 complaints had been filed against Labour members over alleged anti-semitic behaviour, many based on online comments. In a third of those cases, insufficient evidence had been produced.

The 453 other allegations represented 0.08 percent of the 540,000-strong Labour membership. Hardly “endemic” or “institutional”, it seems.

Intemperate language

Those figures, it should be remembered, have almost certainly been inflated by the efforts of Corbyn’s opponents to trawl through Labour members’ social media accounts in search of comments, some of them predating Corbyn’s leadership, that could be portrayed as anti-semitic.

Intemperate language flared especially in 2014 – before Corbyn became leader – when Israel launched a military operation on Gaza that killed large numbers of Palestinian civilians, including many hundreds of children

Certainly, it is unclear how many of those reportedly anti-semitic comments concern not prejudice towards Jews, but rather outspoken criticism of the state of Israel, which was redefined as anti-semitic last year by Labour, under severe pressure from MPs such as Berger and Ryan and Jewish lobby groups, such as the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Labour Movement.

Seven of the 11 examples of anti-semitism associated with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition adopted by Labour concern Israel. That includes describing Israel as a “racist endeavour”, even though Israel passed a basic law last year stripping the fifth of its population who are not Jewish of any right to self-determination, formally creating two classes of citizen.

Illustrating the problem Labour has created for itself as a result, some of the most high-profile suspensions and expulsions have actually targeted Jewish members of the party who identify as anti-Zionist – that is, they consider Israel a racist state. They include Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Martin Odoni, Glyn Secker and Cyril Chilson.

Another Jewish member, Moshe Machover, a professor emeritus at the University of London, had to be reinstated after a huge outcry among members at his treatment by the party.

Unthinking prejudice

Alan Maddison, who has been conducting statistical research on anti-semitism for a pro-Corbyn Jewish group, Jewish Voice for Labour, put the 0.08 percent figure into its wider social and political context this week

He quoted the findings of a large survey of anti-semitic attitudes published by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in 2017. It found that 30 percent of respondents from various walks of society agreed with one or more of eight anti-semitic views, ranging from stereotypes such as “Jews think they are better than other people” to Holocaust denial.

However, lead researcher Daniel Staetsky concluded that in most cases this was evidence of unthinking prejudice rather than conscious bigotry. Four-fifths of those who exhibited a degree of anti-semitism also agreed with at least one positive statement about Jewish people.

This appears to be the main problem among the tiny number of Labour Party members identified in complaints, and is reflected in the predominance of warnings about conduct rather than expulsions and suspensions.

Far-right bigotry

Another of the institute’s findings poses a particular problem for Corbyn’s opponents, who argue that the Labour leader has imported anti-semitism into the party by attracting the “hard left”. Since he was elected, Labour membership has rocketed.

Even if it were true that Corbyn and his supporters are on the far-left – a highly questionable assumption, made superficially plausible only because Labour moved to the centre-right under Tony Blair in the late 1990s – the institute’s research pulls the rug out from under Corbyn’s critics.

It discovered that across the political spectrum, conscious hatred of Jews was very low, and that it was exhibited in equal measure from the “very left-wing” to the “fairly right-wing”. The only exception, as one might expect, was on the “very right-wing”, where virulent anti-semitism was much more prevalent.

That finding was confirmed last week by surveys that showed a significant rise in violent, anti-semitic attacks across Europe as far-right parties make inroads in many member states. A Guardian report noted that the “figures show an overwhelming majority of violence against Jews is perpetrated by far-right supporters”.

Supporters of overseas war

So what is the basis for concerns about the Labour Party being mired in supposed “institutional anti-semitism” since it moved from the centre to the left under Corbyn, when the figures and political trends demonstrate nothing of the sort?

A clue may be found in the wider political worldview of the eight MPs who have broken from Labour.

All but two are listed as supporters of the parliamentary “Labour Friends of Israel” (LFI) faction. Further, Berger is a former director of that staunchly pro-Israel lobby group, and Ryan is its current chair, a position the group says she will hold onto, despite no longer being a Labour MP.

So extreme are the LFI’s views on Israel that it sought to exonerate Israel of a massacre last year, in which its snipers shot dead many dozens of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza in a single day. Faced with a social media backlash, it quietly took down the posts.

The eight MPs’ voting records – except for Gavin Shuker, for whom the picture is mixed – show them holding consistently hawkish foreign policy positions that are deeply antithetical to Corbyn’s approach to international relations.

They either “almost always” or “generally” backed “combat operations overseas”; those who were MPs at the time supported the 2003 Iraq war; and they all opposed subsequent investigations into the Iraq war.

Committed Friends of Israel

In one sense, the breakaway group’s support for Labour Friends of Israel may not be surprising, and indicates why Corbyn is facing such widespread trouble from within his own party. Dozens of Labour MPs are members of the group, including Tom Watson and Ruth Smeeth.

None of these MPs were concerned enough with the LFI’s continuing vocal support for Israel as it has shifted to the far-right under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to have stepped down from the group.

Nor was their committed support for Labour Friends of Israel shaken by a 2017 undercover Al-Jazeera documentary investigating the Israel lobby’s tactics in the UK. It revealed that the LFI and the Jewish Labour Movement were both covertly working closely with an Israeli embassy official, Shai Masot, to damage Corbyn.

In fact, the secret filming recorded Ryan inventing a false claim of anti-semitism against a Labour party member.

She also admitted on camera that she was in almost daily contact with Masot, and was filmed speaking to Masot about £1 million he had secured on the LFI’s behalf to fly Labour MPs on junkets to Israel as part of recruiting them to the Israeli cause.

‘Wrong kind of Jews’

Anti-semitism has taken centre stage in the manoeuvring against Corbyn, despite there being no evidence of significant hatred against Jews in the party. Increasingly, it seems, tangible abuse of Jews is of little interest unless it can be related to Corbyn.

The markedly selective interest in anti-semitism in the Corbyn context among the breakaway MPs and supposed anti-semitism watchdogs has been starkly on show for some time.

Notably, none expressed concern at the media mauling of a left-wing, satirical Jewish group called Jewdas when Corbyn was widely attacked for meeting “the wrong kind of Jews”. In fact, leading Labour figures, including the Jewish Labour Movement, joined in the abuse.

And increasingly in this febrile atmosphere, there has been an ever-greater indulgence of the “right kind of anti-semitism” – when it is directed at Corbyn supporters.

A troubling illustration was provided on the TV show Good Morning Britain this week, when Tom Bower was invited on to discuss his new unauthorised biography of Corbyn, in which he accuses him of anti-semitism. The hosts looked on demurely as Bower, a Jewish journalist, defamed fellow Jewish journalist Michael Segalov as a “self-hating Jew” for defending Corbyn on the show.

Revenge of the Blairites

So what is the significance of the fact that the Labour MPs who have been most outspoken in criticising Corbyn – those who helped organise a 2016 leadership challenge against him, and those who are now rumoured to be considering joining the breakaway faction – are heavily represented on the list of MPs supporting LFI?

For them, it seems, vigorous support for Israel is not only a key foreign policy matter, but a marker of their political priorities and worldview – one that starkly clashes with the views of Corbyn and a majority of the Labour membership.

Anti-semitism has turned out to be the most useful – and damaging – weapon to wield against the Labour leader for a variety of reasons close to the hearts of the holdouts from the Blair era, who still dominate the parliamentary party and parts of the Labour bureaucracy.

Perhaps most obviously, the Blairite wing of the party is still primarily loyal to a notion that Britain should at all costs maintain its transatlantic alliance with the United States in foreign policy matters. Israel is a key issue for those on both sides of the Atlantic who see that state as a projection of Western power into the oil-rich Middle East and romanticise Israel as a guarantor of Western values in a “barbaric” region.

Corbyn’s prioritising of Palestinian rights threatens to overturn a core imperial value to which the Blairites cling.

Tarred and feathered

But it goes further. Anti-semitism has become a useful stand-in for the deep differences in a domestic political culture between the Blairites, on one hand, and Corbyn and the wider membership, on the other.

A focus on anti-semitism avoids the right-wing MPs having to admit much wider grievances with Corbyn’s Labour that would probably play far less well not only with Labour members, but with the broader British electorate.

As well as their enthusiasm for foreign wars, the Blairites support the enrichment of a narrow neo-liberal elite, are ambivalent about austerity policies, and are reticent at returning key utilities to public ownership. All of this can be neatly evaded and veiled by talking up anti-semitism.

But the utility of anti-semitism as a weapon with which to beat Corbyn and his supporters – however unfairly – runs deeper still.

The Blairites view allegations of anti-Jewish racism as a trump card. Calling someone an anti-semite rapidly closes down all debate and rational thought. It isolates, then tars and feathers its targets. No one wants to be seen to be associated with an anti-semite, let alone defend them.

Weak hand exposed

That is one reason why anti-semitism smears have been so maliciously effective against anti-Zionist Jews in the party and used with barely a murmur of protest – or in most cases, even recognition that Jews are being suspended and expelled for opposing Israel’s racist policies towards Palestinians.

This is a revival of the vile “self-hating Jew” trope that Israel and its defenders concocted decades ago to intimidate Jewish critics.

The Blairites in Labour, joined by the ruling Conservative Party, the mainstream media and pro-Israel lobby groups, have selected anti-semitism as the terrain on which to try to destroy a Corbyn-led Labour Party, because it is a battlefield in which the left stands no hope of getting a fair hearing – or any hearing at all.

But paradoxically, the Labour breakaway group may have inadvertently exposed the weakness of its hand. The eight MPs have indicated that they will not run in by-elections, and for good reason: it is highly unlikely they would stand a chance of winning in any of their current constituencies outside the Labour Party.

Their decision will also spur moves to begin deselecting those Labour MPs who are openly trying to sabotage the party – and the members’ wishes – from within.

That may finally lead to a clearing out of the parliamentary baggage left behind from the Blair era, and allow Labour to begin rebuilding itself as a party ready to deal with the political, social, economic and environmental challenges of the 21st century.

So, we have a coalescing of white male repressions projecting outward by way of a latent Puritanical reflex, one that must keep someone in the stocks, with an insidious white nationalism out to create hierarchies within hierarchies regarding passports and citizenship — in the interest of controlling surplus populations, and a neo left anti-communism made up of a structural Ayn Randian Capitalism, with equal parts Lyndon LaRouche, and Hannah Arendt by way of Noam Chomsky.

Watching a dozen SWAT members donned in full Robo cop gear from Clackamas County Sheriffs and Beaverton Police departments play with a drone, laughing the evening away while the Army veteran writhed in pain with their seven bullets inside him was one trauma moment (PTSD-inducing event) for me working as a social worker.

The day before, the veteran was in front of the homeless shelter where I had worked for almost a year – a transitional center run by the Salvation Army, which has come to be known by me and others around the world as the Starvation Army — walking the sidewalk with sign in hand: “The Salvation Army and Veterans Administration kill veterans.”

He had been exited (forcefully evicted) from the homeless shelter two weeks before, based on arbitrary and punitive reasons, and he was in full PTSD and suicidal mode. He had been handcuffed a few days earlier after seeking treatment at a mental health facility. His wife and their service animal are still living in the facility he had called a temporary home while working with case managers on getting mental health care, bettering credit scores, and finding suitable housing using section eight or other vouchers set up for struggling vets who have experienced homelessness.

Before the male executive director of the facility in Beaverton had called in the SWAT team, the veteran was in his full-sized pick-up truck, with a handgun, seeking solace, and wanting a hearing about his eviction. The Ford 150 dually was parked on Salvation Army property. He had been living in the truck, away from his wife and emotional support dog. The ED, himself a combat veteran with poor people skills, and self-professed as having major PTSD requiring heavy doses of SSRIs and at one point admitting to case managers he might be borderline personality disorder affected, was a rotten choice to talk to the rejected veteran. Once the 20-plus police officers with guns drawn set up their shoot-to-kill perimeter, this executive director started yammering on how he was getting amped up for a fight.

Less than four hours after the streets had been closed, after the schools had been alerted for complete lock-down mode, and after our 80 residents were forced by flak-jacket wearing officers to hole up in the facility’s cafeteria, seven of 13 shots from strategically set-up (and wholly out of harm’s way) sniper positions ripped through the veteran’s body. There was nowhere any of his pistol’s bullets could have gone to cause human harm since the multi-force police brigade had rammed his truck with one armored vehicle and had another one pinned up on the passenger side.

The veteran never pulled his gun on or shot at police officials; he was in his truck, crying out for help. The executive director was a trigger that precipitated this event, and he was worthless at the SWAT site. The veteran was willing to surrender his weapon to his wife, but the macho male force denied that request.

Traffic diverted for half the day, a big show of multiple policing agency force, a militarized operation, and the result was a wounded veteran face down in the dirt facing attempted murder charges and almost a hundred veterans and staff and family members assaulted emotionally by the big stand-off and sniping. Unfortunately, the Salvation Army felt it necessary to move this Executive Director (one of my former supervisors) onto an even higher position in the Portland area Salvation Army corps. He’s now called the social services director for the Cascade Division.

At midnight, April 25, 2018, more than 12 hours after the veteran with a pistol (plea for help) started his own trauma-reducing pleas, a firetruck tanker came in and sprayed a few hundred gallons of water onto the blood-soaked earth where the veteran lay with small-caliber slugs in his body while cops and paramedics took their time administering first aid before the EMT arrived.

One physically intimidating veteran with mental health distress goaded by the facility’s director who allowed a maintenance man’s unruly and poking behavior toward this fellow continue for weeks had been shot down because he was seeking help – from us, from the VA, from any mental health facility. I was there during the lock-down with a few staff trying to quell the anxiety. I was outside when the soldier was shot. I was there watching cops bruise him and handcuff him as the veteran yelled out in pain from the entry wounds.

Cops were laughing less than five minutes after the ambulance carted off the shot-down soldier to be thrown into an ER handcuffed and guarded by empty-headed cops. Overtime and redneck comradery and the power of the badge make for some joyful times for cops.

In a 24-hour period, the Starvation Army and the executive director, who went MIA the next day and shunted his self-professed Army credo of “leave no man/woman behind,” failed to provide any trained crisis response teams and social workers and counselors to come to the facility to help us – staff, social workers and residents – deal with one of our own being mowed down on our facility’s grounds. Even the proverbial Salvation Army canteens with hot food and coffee and chaplains never showed up in a phalanx of solidarity and support.

I was there, talking to the residents who had been holed up under police orders listening to the cop talk in real time as police radios were picked up on their personal phone apps. An entire spectrum of thoughts and feelings came rushing out. It took my long letter of complaint to the Starvation Army’s head officers to get any response around the shooting validated with my protestations forcing the big wigs to get professionals to come out to our community to counsel us, the vets and the respective family members. It took a week! Seven days had gone by with no VA psychiatrists, no civilian experts in PTSD and post shooting trauma, yet the high anxiety and PTSD triggers and deeper resentments had already been embedded in every one of the veterans and their family members living at the homeless center.

The first thing out of one of the top dog’s mouth (they call themselves majors and captains) more than a week later at a short staff meeting was how pleased he was as the Cascade Division’s ranking major that his team of propagandists working for the Army had contained the media “damage” (AKA journalists’ attention) and that the Army’s brand was still intact. This major actually told us that the goal of the Portland area Cascade Division was to be seen as the best non-profit in the state.

This occurred two months in my role as a case manager at the homeless/transition center, called the Veterans and Family Center. I should have cut and run then, as the incompetence and callousness of the facility’s director and the Salvation Army’s big-wigs came at me like a constant cloud of hydrogen sulfide, daily.

Social Services 101

I can go way back in my career as a journalist in small towns (Tombstone, Sierra Vista, Bisbee, et al) or as a teacher in adult basic education classes, gang prevention programs or in prisons where my first linkage to being both writer-teacher and social worker-counselor was galvanized. I’ve worked with Central American refugees during the Reagan fascist years of killing fields in Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua. I’ve worked with children of migrant workers whose lives outside of college were lived in lean-tos and fields where both my students and parents worked the chili and tomato fields. I’ve worked with gang-influenced youth with sexual assault and abandonment deep in their lives. I’ve run a writing program where some of my elderly students had death camp numbers stenciled on their arms. In prisons as a teacher, on military compounds as an instructor, and with homeless youth and adults facing addiction, criminal backgrounds and psychiatric and developmental learning narratives, I may have been deemed the instructor-teacher-professor, but half or more of my work was around counseling people in various forms of crisis and recovery.

Ironically, getting in with the Salvation Army was a process of ending my short-lived unemployment benefits after having a go with another poverty pimping outfit where I worked to mentor and counsel youth 16 to 21 in Oregon’s foster youth support system called the Independent Living Program. Yet it was another program where I was railroaded out of a job (see: “My Fate as a Social Worker Seal by a Vaccine Named Gardasil”). It’s poverty pimping run on the shoulders of mostly women staff and directors and management.

Getting the job meant that same Army veteran director — who was largely responsible for the spiraling down the drain of another military vet at his facility who is now in jail charged with attempted murder – attempted to understand inside his restricted cognitive arena how and why someone with all my experience and with one extra graduate degree than he has was going into such a lowly paid social services job.

As a Marxist and socialist, I run into that capitalist shit all the time, and head first into this retrograde thinking and these bosses (not my bosses but in their own minds they feel as if they are lording over everyone) who are dumber and meaner than an out of work syphilitic gunslinger from Tombstone. Seriously, the social services arena I have directly launched myself into for more than 10 years has been both compelling to me for all the services and learning curves I’ve been involved in and also disheartening to know so many people who call themselves social workers or social services providers who are not just mean as cuss but antithetical to any radical social work paradigm I have been taught under.

For the most part, largely because of the screwed-up labor force and sexism around employment in certain arenas like teaching and social services, I have been around some messed up people, mostly women, who treat clients like convicts, and who see their roles in life as punishers, gatekeepers of services, holders of the purse, scolders and possessors of the get out of jail passes or keys to the forced living hells of mental health programs and addiction treatment regimens they peddle.

I have crossed swords with so-called supervisors and co-workers who have little regard for nuancing the role of epigenetics and lived experiences have on people in various iterations of struggle. It’s always been rule-abiding young and older women, and female supervisors who have no wits about them around how each person in each and every one of their individual struggles is unique and can’t be dealt with along some strict battery of DSM-V or mental health dictums and series of “treatment modalities.”

According to the prepublication materials, the essence of the new DSM consists in the modifications it introduces in the extensive psychiatric nosology, specifically adding diagnostic categories to diseases of unknown biological origin and uncertain etiology. But the real problem lies much deeper—in the understanding of such diseases itself; it is the problem with the old, fundamental, and universally accepted diagnostic categories of thought disorder vs. affective disorders, or schizophrenia vs. manic and unipolar depression, on which all the other diagnostic categories of mental illness of unknown etiology, new and not so new, are based. DSM’s approach is similar to attempting to salvage a house, falling apart because built on an unsound foundation, by adding to it a fresh coat of paint and new shutters. What is needed, in contrast, is to dismantle the structure, establish a sound foundation, and then rebuild the house on top of it.

DSM-5, and DSM in general, is just an expression of the increasing confusion in the mental health community (including both researchers and clinicians, and both psychiatry and psychology with their neuroscience contingents) in regard to the nature of the human mental processes—or the mind-—altogether.

These neoliberal Americans are trained to respect credentials, white lab coats, plethora of made-up and warped diagnoses in that hyper-flawed world of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, 5th edition.

There is absolutely nothing redeeming in Ken Kesey’s Nurse Ratched in his book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, yet I have run into variations on a theme applicable to Ratched’s role in re-traumatizing and redirecting clients-customers-patients into living Hells. I don’t make this sex-gender observation lightly or with glee, but I do know from direct experience for four decades in dozens of different jobs in education and social services that Americans, whether male or female, are warped by capitalism, by our punishment/penury culture, this AA 12-step “giving up one’s self to a greater power” folly, and anything tied to exacting some sort of set of regulations and rules on people to teach them they are in a perpetual restitution to society for their scarlet letter lives.

It has not been a pretty thing to see 26-year-olds all the way to 75-year-olds acting like turnkeys around grown men and women, leveling both a patronizing and demeaning attitude toward people in crisis and various stages of recovery and trauma, while playing the PC and LGBTQ cards with a gusto not equaled by their almost resentful personages around the very people who have directly given them a job in social services: the broken, relapsing, disenfranchised people they call clients.

Poverty Pimping and Retributive (In-)justice and Forced (lifelong) Restitution and a constant bullhorn of reminders to the traumatized and broken and mentally and emotionally fragile people that they are indeed “the other” promotes a very warped system of social services delivery in this country, from Veterans Administration professionals to half-way house counselors to street preachers.

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.

Portlandia, Hub of Homeless, Center of Social Services Students in Debt

The irony is that Portland has many colleges and universities catering to the social services majors and graduate schools, whereupon young people come out to Keep Portland Weird land from all parts of the USA, and end up bunking up five to a studio since rents are criminal, and housing stock minimal. Portland State University, University of Portland, Willamette University, Concordia, Pacific Lutheran, George Fox to name a few, and a large community college system crank out BSWs and MSWs (bachelor’s and master’s of social work) with debts in the upper (or greater than) $80K for these jobs that pay $17 or $18 an hour.

I have a friend who is working on a program to provide room and board for nursing students who are attending the various colleges around Portland since many of them attend class night and day and sleep in their cars. Her goal is to match aging in place seniors with young students willing to do the room and board and companionship thing to get through college. We have a nursing shortage in the US, of over 100,000, and that figure is going up daily.

Oregon ranks 51 in the US on social services outcomes, and the so-called social work/social services labor force is in constant flux, with people (like myself) going from one poverty pimping outfit to the next. All those great seminars at the colleges on radical social work and revolutionary community participation and reform, and all those hands-on classes around self-empowerment, peer support, harm reduction and trauma informed care taught by tenured (and mostly part-time faculty) go out the window as soon as they get hired on.

Rapid turnover rates and high caseloads create havoc in both the practitioners’ lives as well as the lives of the clients-customers-residents-patients. How many military veterans whom I have worked with call me brother, a rock star, a go-getter yet have had to say goodbye when I left (December 21, 2018) to move onto the next poverty pimping gig? The number of people (social service workers) in the lives (starting at a young age) of adults with developmental disabilities as they grow older and reach “retirement” age is staggering really, and in some cases it’s hundreds of different people (in some instances, a thousand or more) over a 40-year period of a severely autistic or developmentally disabled adult’s life.

One can only imagine that many people controlling one’s life and being part of one’s social and emotional network coming in, bonding, absorbing all the client’s personal, physical, emotional and spiritual core, and then leaving like a turnstile line at Walmart.

The boomerang effect on we the practitioners is we have lost ties to some vital people in our lives, and our own lives are fragmented, broke up by going from one non-profit to another public agency, never long enough to embed ourselves deeply to affect systemic and social change.

That ground-truthing is what we bring collectively to the table, but we are overworked, overburdened and overmanaged by a system of repression and retaliation. The millions of front-line social workers, et al, should be a force to be reckoned with at state capitals, in community meetings, on boards and in political office. But like everything in America, the workers en mass have little sway over the bulldozing minority — the bosses.

The fact is with 89 million baby boomers, 10,000 of which a day turn 65, and the large grouping of young and old with multiple chronic diseases (some estimates put it at 150 million citizens with one or more chronic illnesses), with the exacting structural violence and structural subservience of the One Percent’s plan for more victims, marks, patients, the need for social service workers is at a high level.

However, low pay, bad work environments, and plethora of dictatorial administrators and out of touch directors and petty front-line supervisors, we can see the system is already flawed from the start. Radical social work means peeling apart the layer upon layer that have broken people, broken families and broken communities. Being on the ground and in the faces of the gatekeepers and the Little Eichmann’s is the only way to make significant deep change. In the USA, there is no great history of radical social work, or any sort of human services.

Radical social work means working WITH clients, not against them.

Human Resources departments in these non-profits are staffed by Little Eichmann’s, bean counters and people who lord over the lowly $18-an-hour BSW’s/MSW’s lives. Directors, some of whom took those same radical and progressive seminars in the same universities and colleges, are now task-masters, warped on their little bit of power over both staff and clients, and broken themselves, working from a place of dictatorial inhumaneness and non-trauma informed management.

The Bosses’ “issues” and their “recovery steps” become everyone else’s problems

I’ve read much about and studied closely the panopticism of warehouses (think Jeff Dildo Salesman Bezos), bureaucracies (now every courtroom and city hall has closed circuit eyes and pat downs and metal detectors), hospitals and mental health clinics, schools and corporations, all designed as institutions of oppression, control and putting us in our sheeple and scared places. In the past 50 years, this country in particular, but not exclusively (look at the peeping Tom British and their CCTV, like a Stasi wet dream), is okay with anal probes, mouth swabbing, background and credit checks, lie detectors for employment, signed loyalty oaths and forced arbitration clauses and right to work sign offs.

Being surveilled — normalized by PK12 schools with flak-jacket armed guards, and the shit that is Hollydirt, allowing for a deep normalizing of anal probing reflected in all the shit-show military-fawning, Blackwater-loving, CIA/FBI-respecting, Muslim/People of Color-hating movies churned out daily in this carnival of deep state compliance sadomasochisms — is not just tolerated but regaled in fraidy cat USA.

The veterans are used to every word and action while in the military being dictated and recorded (and used against them), and they are even more broken down when they end up as users of substances (self-medicating) and on the streets or in tents or backseats while begging to get into a homeless shelter (transitional housing program). They will submit, begrudgingly and with a large amount of anti-authoritarianism thrown in, to rules, no matter how arbitrary and capricious they may be.

Those rules-regulations-policies-dictums-routines-contractual agreements then become the defining limitations (and daily work) of the overlords and their minions, AKA social workers. They are there to make sure social order is maintained, that deviations from the rules go noticed and punished, that compliance reminds the veterans they are one or two broken policies from being thrown out on the streets. This system of social engineering and denuding of one’s emotional and reactive landscape is what many of the people I have worked with and worked under get their proverbial identities from: making grown men and women follow rules and program milestones and ending any self-actualization and self-identity.

We are at the whim of the VA, state agencies, the Salvation Army and the lord (Jesus Christ), who can giveth and taketh away on a flip of a coin!

If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen, there is no risk of their committing violence upon another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents. (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish)

I have found that as a radical second wave feminist that many of the people I work with constantly remind me of my “looming and privileged” male voice, my white male patriarchal “position” in this country and my over-the-top experience and depth of travel. I have been told I have the luxury of socialistic beliefs, the pedigree for espousing revolution and anti-authoritarianism, the birthright of muckraking and whistle blowing. This isn’t just a matter of reverse sexism, which I am not sure is the operating principle of these people. There is some deep misandry, for sure, and many (most) of the people I work with are steeped in the rottenness of the Democratic Party and their own patriotism and war mongering; and as truly consumerist and capitalist through and through, even if they struggle daily to keep up with student loan payments, the usury of the Portland rental market, and the high cost of living in KeepthisCityWeird, they have relationships based on power, privilege (or wanting both) and materialism.

An Occupy Camp Doesn’t Make the Place Left-wing or Accepting of Anarchy

Another warping of one’s self-worth (or over-worth in the case of social services’ supervisors and ED’s of the non-profits, both religious in origin or secular) is the fact that a modicum of things happening in Portland are leftist on the surface. That gets a warped amount of media attention, usually rife with false balance/false equivalency and reactionary reporting. The draw to Portland and the four-counties it holds sway over disenfranchised and misbegotten folk around the country is the number and breadth of social services agencies assisting young and old with homeless services, addiction counseling, recovery programs, and criminal record expungement.

In reality, there is nothing highly progressive or leftist, let alone radical, in the make-up of Portland. It’s a city and a metropolitan service area with outlying communities that draw in some of the more reactionary types from California, Texas and mid-west. Techies are libertarian at best, racist and anti-socialist at worst. They bring their knee-jerk conservatism to this great mossy, green place of dead progressive ideas. Portland is mired with constant freeway gridlock 24/7, and the number of people barely making it — living in vans and sometimes 30-year-old RVs, and working two jobs — is steadily rising. Then add to that the rush of the poverty pimps and their battalions of college graduates needing-work-with-heaping-school-debt-to-deal-with, mired in a cradle-to-grave negative outlook that harangues them daily as they attempt to square some meaning in their lives of rents that are criminally high, no-cause evictions, a deep class divide, an embedded racist history for both the city and the state, and a social services system that is a band-aid on the gaping chest wound of neoliberal assaults.

Like the Salvation Army’s propagandists in power, their big PR brokering to get more government (federal, state, city) grants, and their social media savvy techs, the others in the getting to the Top 100 non-profits in Oregon game are loaded at the admin level with HR specialists, VPs, legal crews, grant writers, development directors and giving (begging) aficionados. You’ll see plastered on their Facebook and web pages, and inside their year-end reports and fancy printed pamphlets, the very people in crisis they serve who are many times denigrated behind their back and to their faces as the scum of the earth.

But millennials and information managers don’t use such overtly dehumanizing terms to couch their consternation of, impatience with, and misunderstanding for their clients. Social services is a hard row to hoe, and when you work the arena believing the crap of a punishment society with Big Pharma and Big Criminal Justice running the show, the holistic approach and systems thinking necessary to understand the gutting out of families-communities-cultures-individuals go to the wayside.

Too many times at the Salvation Army (a billion dollar a year outfit anchored in every corner of the world which started more than 150 years ago in England), fellow social services workers, in the religious poverty pimping outfit and others with the VA and state agencies, roll their eyes when confronting some of the clients. Many have nicknames for people in crisis, negative or infantile ones, and for the most part, I have seen grown adults — and in the case of combat veterans — treated as children or dicks, as several staff members have put it as their philosophy of male veterans.

The new executive director of my old outfit, who replaced the embattled and PTSD-riddling former combat vet ED, lords over the residents and calls them her little flowers (if she doesn’t like them), and on many occasions, she has outright lied to clients, promising them things she never delivers. The food at the place is dangerous for most people, especially those with medical conditions like diabetes, heart failure, obesity and liver and kidney disease. I’ve proposed new healthy food programs, where I was promised by local vendors fresh produce and decent alternatives to the starch, sugar, dough, fat and salt crap served at the Center, but to no avail, because the new ED, like others, say they are following some screwed up rule stating a diet of meat (fatty ground round), starch (potatoes and pasta) and veggie (canned peas) has to be served daily. The amount of food waste at the Center far outpaces the typical 50 percent wasted food stat in the average American home.

What’s Draconian about this shelter is, first, it is the only shelter in the Portland region of the Starvation Army that “makes” money, and it is a unique one in the USA with very few that take on both single vets and their families. The issue is all clients, once they get into the shared kitchen-less studio apartments, they are treated like children and damaged goods, and they have to follow arbitrary rules, and they have a clock ticking which hangs over all their heads – they have limited time to get their shit together or else they are exited, back to homelessness. The fact is, veteran homelessness is going up, not down. The number twenty-two also hangs like a reaper’s scythe over them: the number of veterans who commit suicide each day!

The shelter is a holding tank, where all the paranoias and anti-social behaviors come trickling out. While I implemented writing courses, effective communication classes and movie discussion classes, and a raft of outings, the bottom-line for the management is “butts in beds” gets the $60 a day per homeless person paid to the billion-dollar non-profit. I’ve had to go toe-to-toe with the gatekeepers about fighting for my veterans who want overnight passes that go beyond two nights, for veterans who want to reconnect with long-lost adult children or who have a chance at a family reunion out of state.

You come in, the VA pays $60 a day for each vet to the Starvation Army, and you get paunchy from all the bad food, you are constantly reminded of rules-rules/violations-violations/ infractions-infractions and you have this Christian façade to work with, and, bam, your 120 days are expired, and you might end up being evicted (that’s the constant fear of veterans, especially those with amputations, chronic pulmonary and cardiac issues.) Worse, though, are those veterans who do get housing through the graces of punishment bureaucracies and the good auspices of case managers and others working hard on their situations: they end up reverting back to homelessness.

The idea of follow up care and case management for months after a veteran leaves with a lease or mortgage (in rare cases) is lost, and there are no fancy grants or non-profits that provide those services. So, the facility they are in is a community of sorts: literally has a hundred folk, 19 dogs, and a lively glow. I used to run classes, documentary and movie nights, and there are recovery and non-violent communication groups and activities.

Then, once a single veteran leaves, his struggle with mismanaging paltry monthly fixed incomes, his own struggle with medical/medicine issues, the abuse of booze and drugs, and rising depression are magnified and recharged once a sense of community and friendships are taken away.

The system is flawed from the beginning – no holism, no systems thinking, and, alas, the vicious cycle of recidivism feeds the poverty pimps, allowing and promoting for shitty paying jobs to continually go advertised and many times unfilled.

I have had to recently file a five-page single spaced whistle blower set of grievances on the way veterans are treated at the facility, with these overlords not just chastising them for being addicts, but downright attacking them. Since it’s a clean and sober environment with random UA’s and twice-a-day breathalyzers, this new overlord comes out in public community meetings saying, “I can smell a user a mile away . . . remember, I once was a cocaine addict, and I worked at a Betty Ford clinic, so I know all the tricks, all the excuses. I will eventually find you out if you are using in my facility.”

Veterans and their families are being threatened with evictions if they don’t find housing quick enough or aren’t saving their pittances of income in large enough quantities. There is a constant Damocles sword over the heads of people who 100 percent hands down have diagnosed PTSD, and most of the women vets are going through the nightmare of reliving military sexual trauma (assault); on my case load, male veterans have opened up in bigger and bigger numbers to their own MST during boot camp or in a war theater.

However, the Salvation Army workers treat these people like the enemy, like thieving and conniving people trying to get one over on the pathetic lives of social services agency workers. When one acts outside the punishment model, outside the Abu Ghraib plans and beliefs, as a revolutionary like myself, I get singled out, called a vegan communist, and continually told I rock the boat too much or act not as a team player. I do not reluctantly but most assuredly call them what they are: the pipsqueak poverty pimps working for the big johns in the head office. Mix that with a Nurse Ratched (the notorious and now closed Oregon mental health facility called Fairview is where Kesey set the narrative of his Cuckoo’s Nest novel) set of operating systems and beliefs, and the system is rotting from within!

Built on a 670 acre plot, Fairview was specifically charged with “the care and training of such feeble-minded, idiotic, epileptic, and defective persons as have been or may hereafter be committed to its custody.” Nothing politically-correct about their verbiage and they didn’t hesitate to put people on the intake roll.

Many of the first patients were epileptic; few of them were severely physically handicapped. Therefore, an emphasis was placed on training them for practical work. Developing skills and learning a trade is a valuable asset to any individual, and there was no question that it was appropriate to put these folks to work. Without a daily wage, they were also a very good value.

Fairview was more than an institution; it was also a large farm. By 1920, 400 acres were used for crops and 45 acres for orchards, the patients also raised hogs, chickens, and both dairy and beef cattle.

In 1917, a commitment law was passed to standardize admissions and to insure that valuable space was used for the “feeble-minded” and not the “insane.” It also stated that no one under 5 years of age was to be admitted. This age limitation was removed four years later. Children by the score were “raised” at Fairview.

The Ultimate Betrayal

In 1923, the Board of Eugenics was formed. Roughly based on the idea of “natural selection”, eugenics was the belief that society should be “improved” by keeping “unfit or unwanted” people from having children.

The institution’s superintendent served as an ex-officio member of the board that provided for the “sterilization of all feeble-minded, insane, epileptics, habitual criminals, moral degenerates, and sexual perverts who are a menace to society.” The board examined the mental and physical condition of institutionalized individuals who could “produce offspring inheriting inferior or antisocial traits” and decided who should or shouldn’t have the right to reproduce.

Many were forced by state law to undergo sterilization surgery before they could be allowed to leave the institution. Others who were sterilized included criminals, homosexuals, and teenage girls who “misbehaved.” By 1929, 300 Fairview residents had been sterilized.

Parole for residents was established in 1931. Parole had five requirements:

That rot, unfortunately, presents itself as desperation: many veterans I have worked with want to off themselves. Many veterans keep the feelings closed in. Many veterans, under this constant fear of being thrown back out onto the streets, are holding in so much that I fear that there will be another shooting, another incident, another end-of-his-rope veteran willing to let loose with a machete, crossbow, pistol or AR-15.

For that sense of self-worth and self-preservation, and for the sanctity of people being treated and case managed in a homeless center, my conscience disallowed me to continue working with retrograde, punitive and dangerously ignorant people.

Today, it’s not that easy to take the words of Harriet Beecher Stowe or all the self-help gurus who go on the attack of suicidal and successful suicide veterans:

When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.

Part Two: Systemic Radical Change on the Ground and from Within; Angry Veterans & Mass Shootings; Shot in the Heart. It’s a look at the connection to Gary Gilmore and the power of family and epigenetics to determine the life of a teenager and adult: whether the abused child comes out as an adult Desmond Tutu or Charles Manson. The history of the Starvation Army’s negative activities. What is exactly a “wounded warrior.” What it is that makes the VA flawed, a behemoth, a killer of dreams, people? More!

An American student of Palestinian descent detained in Israel’s airport for nearly a fortnight has become an unexpected cause celebre. Lara Alqasem was refused entry under legislation passed last year against boycott activists, and Israeli courts are now deciding whether allowing her to study human rights at an Israeli university threatens public order.

Usually those held at the border are swiftly deported, but Ms Alqasem appealed against the decision, becoming in the process an improbable “prisoner of conscience” for the boycott cause.

The Israeli government, led by strategic affairs minister Gilad Erdan, claims that the 22-year-old is a leader of the growing international boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. Activists like Ms Alqasem, he argues, demonise Israel.

Two lower courts have already ruled against the student. Israel’s supreme court has postponed her deportation until Wednesday while it reconsiders the evidence. But refusing to go quietly, Ms Alqasem is attracting increasing international attention to her plight.

So far Israeli officials have shown only that Ms Alqasem once belonged to a small Palestinian solidarity group at a Florida university that backed boycotting a hummus company over its donations to the Israeli army.

Under pressure, Ms Alqasem has disavowed a boycott of Israel, citing as proof her decision to enroll in a masters programme in Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Given the blanket hostility in Israel to the boycott movement, Ms Alqasem has found a surprisingly wide array of allies in her legal struggle.

Members of the small Zionist-left Meretz party visited her and demanded she be allowed to attend the course, which began on Sunday.

Ami Ayalon, a retired head of the Shin Bet, the secret police that oversees security checks at Israel’s borders, warned that the agency was now “a problem for democracy” in repeatedly denying foreigners entry.

Vice-chancellors of eight Israeli universities sent a letter of protest to the government and 500 academics at Hebrew University submitted a petition decrying Ms Alqasem’s incarceration.

The solidarity has been unprecedented – and perplexing.

Israeli officials control entry not only to Israel but also to the occupied Palestinian territories. For decades, foreigners with Arab-sounding names – like Ms Alqasem – have been routinely harassed or turned back at the borders, with barely a peep from most on the Israeli left.

And over the same period, Israel has stripped many thousands of Palestinians from the occupied territories of the right to return to their homeland after living abroad. These abuses, too, have rarely troubled consciences in Israel.

Israel’s universities are worried that the academic boycott has highlighted their long-term complicity in Israel’s occupation and is gradually eroding their international standing. Joint research projects with foreign universities are in jeopardy, as is their lucrative income from programmes they wish to expand for overseas students.

The universities want to co-opt Ms Alqasem as a poster girl for academic freedom in Israel.

They hope she will provide cover for their guilty secret: that they have stood by, or actively assisted, as Israel made a mockery of academic freedom for Palestinians under occupation. Research shows that Israel’s universities have strong ties to the nation’s military, which regularly attacks Palestinian places of learning and limits Palestinians’ freedom to study by enforcing strict movement restrictions.

Jewish liberals in Israel and the US, meanwhile, are concerned at the entrenchment of the Israeli far-right’s rule. In recent weeks, a wave of Israeli and American Jewish activists have been detained and questioned at the border over their politics.

Those liberals desperately need to draw a red line, halting the expansion of racial profiling into political forms of profiling that undermine their own status. If the courts uphold the fundamental rights of Ms Alqasem, their own rights will be more secure too.

That was why progressive Jewish leaders in the US added their own voices last week, signing a petition calling for Ms Alqasem to be allowed to study in Israel.

But the case has shone a light not only on the self-interested opportunism of Israeli liberals but also on the hypocrisy of leaders of progressive American Jewish communities.

Ms Alqasem was identified as a boycott activist via a McCarthyite website called Canary Mission, which has murky ties to the Israeli government.

Since it launched in 2014 under the slogan “If you’re racist, the world should know”, the site has built an online database profiling thousands of US academics and students, including Jewish ones, critical of Israel.

Its aim is to terrify US academia into silence on Israel. The site explicitly threatens to send letters to prospective employers accusing its targets – those who show solidarity with Palestinians – of being antisemitic.

Until recently, this blacklist had passed largely unremarked outside pro-Palestinian circles. But since its role in helping Israeli officials bar Jewish and non-Jewish activists became clear, interest in its provenance has grown.

This month the Forward, an American Jewish publication, unmasked several of Canary Mission’s major donors. They include the communal funds of Jewish federations representing liberal communities in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The trail leads back to a shadowy registered charity in Israel called Megamot Shalom, which aims to “protect the image of the state of Israel”.

Simone Zimmerman, an American Jewish peace activist who was detained at the border by Israeli officials in August, lamented that the American Jewish establishment’s secret support for Canary Mission “reeks of hypocrisy and betrayal”.

Supposedly liberal Jewish institutions in Israel and the US wish to be seen battling racism and aiding good causes, including the rights of a Palestinian-American student after she repudiated a boycott of Israel.

But covertly they support and finance projects intended to silence criticism of Israel and enforce the oppression of Palestinians they say they want to help.

Ms Alqasem has been turned into a pawn in the struggle between Jewish liberals and Israeli ultra-nationalists. Israel’s continuing violations of the wider rights of Palestinians – to enter and freely move around their homeland, and to receive an education – are simply not part of the discussion.

It has been nearly three decades since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Despite Russia’s reemergence on the world stage as a respected power after market-oriented ‘reforms’ destroyed its economy for the duration of the nineties, the breakup of the USSR is an event regarded by an increasing amount of Russians as a catastrophic tragedy rather than a triumph of ‘freedom and democracy.’ In recent years, there have been numerous polls showing that more than half of Russians not only regret the collapse of the Soviet Union but would even prefer for its return. However, the nostalgia only comes as a surprise to those who have forgotten that not long before the failed August Coup that led to its demise, the first and only referendum in its history was held in March of 1991 which polled citizens if they wished to preserve the Soviet system.

The results were more than three quarters of the population in the entire socialist federation (including Russia) voting a resounding yes with a turnout of 80% in the participating republics. In Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan the outcome was more than 90% voting for renewal. Even the country with the lowest amount of support, the Ukraine, was still 70% in favor. While the measure was officially banned in six republics— Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, and the three Baltic states— despite being unrecognized by their local governments the vote was still organized and the outcomes were all over 90%. Ironically, the union dissolved five months later under the pretext of establishing ‘democracy’ in Eastern Europe just as it ignored the very wishes of Soviet citizens. After more than 25 years of suffering at the hands of economic and trade liberalization, gutting of state subsidies and mass privatization of the former state-run industry, is it any wonder that Russians are yearning for a return to socialism?

The consequences of the disintegration are still felt in the relations with the United States today. It planted the seeds for the carefully arranged revival of the Cold War that was hiding in plain sight until it surfaced with ‘color revolutions’, proxy wars and dubious spy poisonings. One source of the strained relations between the West and Russia has been the Baltic states, which burgeoned following their integration into the European Union and enrollment in NATO membership in 2004 during its enlargement. NATO continues its provocations with massive war games bordering Kaliningrad, while Moscow is painted as the aggressor even though the U.S. defense spending increase this year alone surpasses Russia’s entire military budget.

The antagonism between Latvia, Estonia and (to a lesser degree) Lithuania with Moscow stems partly from the cessation of the USSR itself. The conclusion of the Cold War resulted in more than 25 million Russians instantly discovering themselves living abroad in foreign countries. For seventy years, fifteen nations had been fully integrated while Russians migrated and lived within the other republics. The Soviet collapse immediately reignited national conflicts, from the Caucasus to the Baltics. While the majority of the ethnic Russian diaspora live in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, nearly 1 million reside in the post-Soviet Baltics and since 1991 they have been subjected to a campaign of forced assimilation, discrimination and exclusion.

The Baltic republics made nationalism their official state policy while moving away from Russia’s sphere of influence into a closer relationship with the West. Boris Yeltsin’s subservience to Washington eclipsed any concern for the fate of captive Russians as the Soviet Bloc was herded into the EU, but his administration did quarrel with the new Baltic authorities and accused them of creating an anti-Russian ‘apartheid.’ As geopolitical tensions have increased under his successor, Vladimir V. Putin, who has embarrassed Western imperialism in the international arena, so has Moscow’s disapproval of the treatment of its minority held hostage in the Baltic Rim. Is a comparison to South Africa warranted? Even if the similarities are only partial, the three states show evidence of deep ethnocracy.

While less than 10% of Lithuania is ethnically Russian, in Latvia and Estonia the number is much higher at a quarter of their entire populations. The three governments have passed laws promoting their official languages and restored citizenship requirements that existed up until 1940, demanding that their Russian minorities apply or risk losing basic rights and guarantees. Russia has interpreted these measures as a form of slow-motion ethnic cleansing intended to coerce Russians to immigrate elsewhere. When the three states first became independent, in an act of systematic discrimination they distributed non-citizen ‘alien’ passports to ethnic Russians and excluded them from obtaining citizenship automatically, even if they had lived and worked in a Baltic state for their entire life. In fact, citizenship was not immediately granted to anyone whose ancestry arrived after 1940, a policy that specifically targeted ethnic Russians who without naturalization are left stateless.

For example, when Estonia first declared its independence more than 30% of its population (or every third person) did not have citizenship of the country of residence. This inscribed ethnic division into their society and although many Russians have become naturalized over the last two decades, there are still more than 80,000 in Estonia without determined status who are mostly former Soviet citizens and their descendants. In Latvia, segregation runs even deeper where more than 250,000 Russians (15% of the population) remain stateless. Even when they do become citizens, the parliaments have attempted to pass laws banning non-EU immigrants (predominantly Russians) from possessing voting rights on several occasions. Polls also show the prejudice within their societies, with many Balts indicating they would prefer their Russian-speaking neighbors to repatriate. Meanwhile, the Russian population has expressed concern about the reemergence of neo-Nazism. The authorities have nurtured holocaust denial, such as the Latvian government objecting to an UNESCO Holocaust exhibition of the Salaspils concentration camp on the basis it would ‘tarnish the country’s image.’ No kidding.

One criteria for the naturalization exams is based on language where in order to become citizens Russians must become fluent in Latvian and Estonian, even though they are such a large minority that in larger cities they often constitute 50% of the population and Russian may be the most spoken language. Simultaneously, any attempt to make Russian a second official language have been struck down. It is a deliberate effort to assimilate the Russian-speaking minority and erase remnants of Soviet culture. In order to obtain basic entitlements, Russians have to pass the tough naturalization tests which many fail several times (especially the elderly), facing fines and risking losing their employment in the process. The tests are notoriously difficult as Latvian and Estonian languages bear little resemblance to Slavic Russian and are much closer to Finnish. Apart from ethnicity, 40% of Latvia as a whole identifies as Russian-speaking and have been accustomed to schooling in their native tongue where they already have low career prospects and income rates. Rather than inclusion, they have been mandated to adopt the Baltic languages. Beginning in 2019, the Russian language education options in Latvia will be discontinued altogether in higher education at colleges and universities as well as many secondary schools, which has sparked demonstrations in protest.

It should be made clear that what ethnic Russians experience in the Baltics has its own particularities that make it significantly different from the institutionalized racism and violently enforced segregation that existed in South Africa (or what many believe is applicable to the Palestinians under Israeli occupation). The word apartheid itself originates from the Afrikaans word for ‘separateness’ (or apart-hood), but an exact comparison is not the real issue. There are many overlapping characteristics that make an analogy arguable. For instance, the use of an ID system denoting ethnicity and alien status with the inability of Russians to participate in the democratic process or politics. Their reduced standing contributes to a society where ethnic groups often do not intermingle and are concentrated in particular areas with Russians mostly residing in urban cities. Yet even Israel (until July 2018) recognized Arabic as a second official language, while none of three Baltic states do so for Russian. When referendums have been held on whether to adopt Russian as a second language, the non-citizen communities are excluded from voting, ensuring its inability to pass.

The exams also coerce Russians to accept a nationalist and historically revisionist account of the last century where the Soviet Union is said to have “occupied” the Baltics. A history lesson is needed to understand how this is untrue and based on pure Nazi mythology. During the Romanov dynasty, the Baltic states had been part of the Russian Empire but became independent for the first time in centuries following the February Revolution in 1917. Along with Belarus and Finland, the Bolsheviks were unable to regain the three republics during the Russian Civil War. During the 1930s, the three nations were officially sovereign states but under their own brutal nationalist regimes. The Soviet liberation of the Baltics can hardly be seen as a ‘forceful incorporation’ considering what they replaced were not democracies themselves and they were absorbed in order to block Hitlerite expansionism.

Since the restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe, the Baltic states have waged a campaign of diminishing and obscuring the Holocaust into a ‘double genocide’ of equal proportions, conflating the Nazis and the Soviets as twin evils. Western ‘democracies’ have helped obfuscate the truth about the widely misunderstood Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the treaty of non-belligerence between Germany and the USSR. The 1939 non-aggression pact has been painted as a ‘secret alliance’ between the Nazis and the Soviets, disregarding that France and Great Britain had done the same with the Germans the previous year with the Munich Agreement. Only the Soviets are said to have ‘conspired’ with Hitler, just as when the West fought the Germans it was for ‘liberal values’ but when the USSR did so it was for competing ‘dominion’ over Europe. In order to mask their own fascist sympathies, the West has falsified the historical reasons for the accord. In reality, there were measures incorporating the Baltic states into the USSR as part of a mutual defense and assistance against German imperialism and their ‘master plan’ for the East.

The truth is that the ruling class in the West feared the spread of communism much more than fascism, and actually viewed the rise of Hitler and Mussolini in Europe as an opportunity to crush the Soviet Union. Leading up to WWII, not only was it Western capital investment which financed the rapid buildup of Germany’s armed forces, but the U.S., Britain and France did everything within their power to encourage Hitler’s aggression toward the USSR. More than once they collectively refused to sign any mutual security alliance with Moscow while appeasing Hitler’s expansionism in Czechoslovakia, with the British in particular guilty of sabotaging negotiations to isolate the Soviets and pit them into a war against Germany.

Stalin was well aware the Nazis planned to expand the Lebensraum further East, but the Soviets were in the midst of a rapid industrialization process that accomplished in a single decade what took the British more than a century. They needed time to guarantee they could defeat an offensive by the Wehrmacht, the most powerful and developed military force in the world at the time. It provided an additional year and ten months of further buildup of Soviet armaments — if not for this move, it is possible the Germans would never have been stopped twenty kilometers short of Moscow and turned the outcome of the war in their favor. The real reason the pact infuriated the West was because it obligated them into having to fight the Germans, something the imperial powers had hoped to avoid altogether.

More disturbingly, the Baltic governments have drawn from the traditions of the far right by whitewashing the local nationalists that sided with Germany during their invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 which broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The Nazi collaborators have been restored and normalized as ‘freedom fighters’ who fought solely for Baltic independence. The Estonian parliament has even adopted resolutions honoring the Estonian Legion and 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian) without any such equivalent measure for the more than 30,000 Estonians who courageously fought in the Red Army. To most Russians, it is an absolute insult to the 27 million Soviets who died defeating the Nazis, including the Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians who did so as well. Today, if they wish to become citizens they must swear an oath of allegiance to this rewriting of history which has been made a precondition for obtaining citizenship. The three states also do not recognize the May 9th Victory Day as a holiday, forcing the Russian minority to celebrate it informally.

The rehabilitation of the local nationalists who fought alongside the Germans has been done under the false premise that the collaboration was a purely strategic alliance. The Soviets are portrayed as equal to or worse than Nazi Germany, a false equivalency between fascism and communism that is a ubiquitous trait among ultra-rightists today. Tens of thousands of Latvians and Estonians volunteered and were conscripted into legions of the SS which participated in the Holocaust, as did Lithuanians in the Nazi-created Territorial Defense Force and their Security Police. They did not simply coordinate on the battlefield with the Germans, but directly participated in the methodical slaughter of Jews, Roma and others because they shared their racism. In Lithuania, for example, quislings welcomed the Wehrmacht as liberators and for the next three years under Nazi occupation helped murder 200,000 Jews, nearly 95% of the country’s Jewish population, a total which exceeded every other European country in terms of percentage of extermination. It is certain that the only thing that prevented Lithuania’s Jews from extinction was the heroism and sacrifice of the Red Army.

The Baltic Waffen SS Units are to be considered as separate and distinct in purpose, ideology, activities, and qualifications for membership from the German SS, and therefore the Commission holds them not to be a movement hostile to the Government of the United States under Section 13 of the Displaced Persons Act, as amended.

While the displaced persons laws let Jewish refugees into the United States, it also provided cover for the reserved spaces for thousands of Nazi collaborators in an open-door policy providing them safe harbor. Following the end of WWII, many of the former members of the Baltic SS units became anti-Soviet partisans known as the Forest Brothers who carried on a guerilla campaign against the Soviets with the assistance of the CIA and MI6 until it was defeated in mid-50s. Unfortunately, Nikita Khruschev then made one of a series of colossal mistakes by permitting the exiled Baltic nationals to return as part of the de-Stalinisation thaw.

The idea that regiments of the Schutzstaffel were fighting purely for Estonian and Latvian independence is a horrifying fabrication in defiance of the overwhelming evidence documented by holocaust historians. The West has exploited this sanitizing of history that reappeared following the reinstatement of free enterprise in eastern Europe which has proliferated the far right in the EU as a whole. Why? It serves their cynical immediate interests in undermining Moscow. The same manipulations are occurring in the Cold War’s sequel. Last year, NATO even produced a short film and a-historical reenactment entitled Forest Brothers: Fight for the Baltics, glorifying the anti-Soviet partisans as part of its propaganda effort against Russia.

Any crimes that were committed by the Soviet NKVD during the war are dwarfed by the tens of thousands of Jews and Roma which were exterminated on an industrial level by the Nazis and their co-conspirators using the race theory — there is no comparison. Not to mention that the reintroduction of the free market to Eastern Europe killed more people than any period in Soviet history, reducing life expectancy by a decade and undoing seventy years worth of progress. We only ever hear of the faults of socialism and the inflated numbers of losses of life attributed to its failure, never the daily crimes of capitalism or the tens of millions lost in the wars it produces. The Soviet brand of socialism was far from perfect, but nevertheless a model for what humanity can achieve in the face of tremendous adversity without being shackled by the contradictions of capitalism — an industrial society with relative equality in education, wealth, employment and basic necessities. Now that Western capitalism is once again collapsing, it is making friends with nationalists to revise its ugly history and the Russian minority in the Baltics are suffering the consequence. It will continue to apportion blame on the up-and-coming power in Moscow, no longer the quasi-colony of the Yeltsin era, for its soon-to-be expiration. Let us hope it does not start another World War in the midst of it — for all our sake.

“Race” has always, historically speaking, been the Achilles Heel of the labor movement in the United States, the number one tool of the bosses and big capital to divide, contain, and crush working-class struggles.

In the history of the worker’s movement in the US there are few things as shameful as the legacy – decade-after-decade – of blatant in-your-face segregationist practices, codified discrimination, and race-hatred against African-American railroaders. The latter story— the oppression and the resistance —is told in Eric Arnesen’s Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality. Among African American rail workers who have experienced and studied this rich history, Arnesen’s book is considered the authoritative reference, the Bible really, of an important, if often overlooked, history in the overall struggle for Black and worker’s rights in the US. (In addition to Brotherhoods of Color, I would recommend Philip Foner’s classic history Organized Labor and the Black Worker 1619-1973 an extraordinarily rich and comprehensive general history that takes up these issues and much more.)

The Railway Labor Act

The passage of the Federal Railway Labor Act of 1924 (RLA) registered important advances for railroad workers in that it was the first federal legal recognition of trade unions by craft. The RLA set up collective bargaining mechanisms that facilitated legally binding contract settlements and the adjudication of grievances, in exchange for rail labor organizations submitting to drawn-out federally “supervised” procedures that in practice gave up the right to strike.

Nevertheless, these concessions to rail labor reined in somewhat the unbridled prerogatives of the rail bosses over decades of on-again, off-again class war on the US rails from the great labor uprisings of 1877 through the struggles of the American Railway Union under the leadership of the legendary Eugene V. Debs.

The American Railway Union fought for the unification of all railroad workers – regardless of craft, race or ethnicity – into one big union. It won a big victory in the 1894 Great Northern strike but fell apart after the massive defeat in the Pullman strike later that year.

Those decades saw regular combat been rail capital and rail labor over worker’s rights, decent wages and living standards, working conditions and safety, the length of the working day, health and vacation benefits, and so on. The RLA, as it became institutionalized, also reined in the violence the rail bosses and their thugs and goons, backed by state and federal cops, National Guard, and armed forces, that was periodically unleashed against rail labor.

By setting up a significant government bureaucracy to oversee the adjudication of contract settlements and grievances, Washington and the rail carriers accomplished a major political goal of buying “labor peace” in the vast national rail industry at a time the United States was rising as a world power following World War I.

Another concession in the interests of rail labor was that the RLA also established the first federally protected pension system for any category of US workers, eleven years before the passage of the Social Security Act. The Railroad Retirement Board still exists to this day parallel to the Social Security Administration (and from which I personally draw my pension as a retired locomotive engineer).

The Institutionalization of Segregation

Perhaps the most pernicious consequences of the RLA was that it froze into place existing, narrow craft categories of workers, and, within that, a system of racist discrimination and the exclusion of non-“white” workers from the legally recognized craft unions, the so-called “Brotherhoods.”

It took decades of struggle in the yards, in the streets, in state and Federal legislatures, and continually in the courts, before the system began to weaken in the 1940s, under the impact of World War II labor shortages and the entry of masses of African American workers into the labor force and the massively expanding war industries. Further pressure mounted in the 1950s, as the Civil Rights Movement began to mobilize and fight, until the whole rotten structure collapsed in ignominy after the passage of the 1964 Federal Civil Rights Act. Over the next few years, Blacks finally began to get jobs, and union membership, as locomotive engineers, firemen, conductors, brakemen and switchmen, electricians and machinists, office personnel, and other crafts beyond “their” craft as sleeping car porters, cooks, and dining car attendants. Women began to enter the operating crafts and other skilled rail jobs in relatively larger numbers in the 1980s and 1990s.

Massive Union Growth in the US

The great labor battles of the 1930s in the United States are downplayed in history textbooks and public education. In fact, this period was marked by a huge working-class and trade union upsurge across the US. The nadir of US labor organization was in the depths of the 1931-32 Great Depression. Union membership had been reduced to 1-2% of the employed workforce. Most of that pitiful number was within the semi-moribund, very conservative AFL craft unions. By 1937-38 the number of organized workers has risen to a full 35% of the US workforce, following a few years of explosive strikes and organizing campaigns under the banner of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) movement with successful drives to organize the steel, auto, trucking, and countless other industries. Nowhere has there been recorded such a massive growth in trade-union membership in such a short period as in the United States at that time.

Unfortunately, this mass organization of the US working class in the 1930s bypassed almost completely the railroad industry and the “whites only” craft-union structure of the “Brotherhoods” that had been codified under the RLA a decade earlier. The craft structure was reinforced, with its segregationist core intact.

The CIO

The CIO did not exclude African-American workers and actively recruited them. In the course of the decade’s great labor battles, such as the Flint Sit-Down strikes of 1936-1937, the battle to organize US Steel and the entire steel industry, and much more, Black and Caucasian workers often organized, mobilized, and fought together and even politically radicalized, to an extent, together. Caucasian workers had to adjust their perspectives and outlooks and confront their prejudices to a degree as they faced the reality that African-American workers had already become a mass presence in US industry. Their numbers and concentration, as well as their evident and obvious capacity for industrial work and a fierce determination to struggle for decent-paying union jobs in the face of race prejudice and segregationist practice was becoming politically unstoppable. Race-baiting was an ever-present political tool of the bosses who fought tooth and nail against trade union advances. Many workers became conscious of these divide-and-conquer tactics and began to rethink their world outlooks.

The Women’s Emergency Brigade organized during the Flint Sit Down Strike of 1937.

Roots of the Civil Rights Movement

Brotherhoods of Color shows that the source and ultimate responsibility for the racist practices and policies that confronted Black workers throughout the 20th Century lay with the private rail carriers and the federal and state governments that catered to their needs and profits. Nevertheless, it must also be said that often these industry and state authorities used the racist and mean-spirited attitudes of the rail unions, the so-called “Brotherhoods” as a cover for inaction or hostile action against Black workers, who were fighting a permanent defensive war to preserve the relatively skilled jobs they had managed to secure.

These AFL-affiliated craft unions, legally recognized under the RLA, contained bylaws and “covenants” that openly excluded Black workers, making them essentially “white job trusts.” The “Brotherhoods” were, at times, even more racist and reactionary than the formal policies of the carriers and government bodies and agencies who regularly came under enough political and legal pressure from Black workers and their allies among labor radicals and civil rights and worker’s rights lawyers, to occasionally give lip service (and usually little else) to fair labor practices.

Brotherhoods of Color meticulously documents the legal battles doggedly fought by civil rights and worker’s rights attorneys in the generally hostile territory of the criminal justice system that predominated at that time. That system, as a whole, acted to uphold and defend – decade after decade – the prevailing system of de jure or de facto segregation and keep Black workers and their attorneys in an endless legal labyrinth. Nevertheless, working through the rigged “legal system,” trying to wring any concessions possible was the main approach of the more conservative Black and liberal organizations like the NAACP.

They took advantage of every contradiction between the fine words of US law and its sordid reality and snail’s pace when it came to race and sex discrimination. Even favorable court rulings here and there were rarely, if ever, implemented in practice. Slick government, carrier, or “Brotherhood” lawyers always managed to drag things out.

This legalistic road was nowhere a sufficient basis for change. It was rather more of a marker and registration for the ebb and flow of the grass-roots struggle against job discrimination and segregation which became unstoppable by the 1960s. Arnesen writes:

Just as proponents of educational desegregation learned in the 1950s, court-imposed solutions were costly, time-consuming, and imperfect. Employment discrimination cases slowly wound their way through the judicial system in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, addressing local variations as well as other obstacles that the ‘white’ craft unions threw in the way of African-American railroaders. Without a doubt, these cases established important principles that undermined the legitimacy of racist practices. In effect, though, they eroded only at a glacial pace both existing and new practices designed to thwart the job rights of black fireman and brakemen.

The struggles documented in Brotherhoods of Color became one of the mightiest rivers flowing into the ocean of the mass Civil Rights Movement emerging in the Deep South in the 1950s and 1960s. The political culmination was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which gave the legal death knell to the segregationist practices that were institutionalized at the time of the Railway Labor Act. After the 1964 legislation the resistance of the craft unions collapsed virtually overnight and a period, sometimes fraught with tension but with steady gains, saw the beginnings of genuine job opportunities, union membership, and advances for African American workers in the freight and passenger rail industry.

Even in the period when Black workers were largely confined to crafts of sleeping car porters, cooks, and dining attendants, Black-led unions representing these workers on the job were organized. The strongest was the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) which became, under the leadership of A. Philip Randolph, a powerful, prestigious organization in Black communities across the United States. The BSCP received a charter from the AFL in 1925 and, for years, unsuccessfully petitioned for the desegregation of the racist “Brotherhoods.” The BSCP was in the forefront of Black rights struggles across the US.

For example, it is not well known that the central organizer of the Montgomery Bus Boycott was E.D. Nixon, President of the Montgomery, Alabama chapter of the BSCP and the NAACP who convinced a courageous 26-year-old Martin Luther King (older prominent local preachers were reluctant to step forward) to take public leadership of what became the turning-point action that became the major spark of the mass movement across the South that soon materialized. The legendary Rosa Parks, whose conscious, well-organized decision to refuse to sit at the back of the bus set off the boycott, was a secretary at the NAACP office employed by BSCP worker and organizer E.D. Nixon.

Randolph had the courage to threaten a mass March on Washington in early 1941 demanding an end to segregation in the armed forces as well as that the massively expanding war industries hire and promote without discrimination Black workers. President Franklin Roosevelt was not happy but issued Executive Order 8802 prohibiting discrimination in war industries under federal contracts. This succeeded in get the March on Washington called off. Randolph later became the honorary chairperson for the famous 1963 March on Washington.

But the real heroes in Brotherhoods of Color are the rank-and-file workers, themselves, fighting to preserve their jobs against the carriers, the state governments, and the racist “Brotherhoods.” Arnesen gives them their voice and records their efforts, their many defeats and some victories which, when all is said and done, contributed mightily to the historic breakthroughs of the 1960s.

The overall history documented comprehensively by Arnesen does reveal clearly that all advances, small and larger, won were a byproduct of independent mass action or the threat of it from below.

Crucially, it should be emphasized that the space to do this was increased materially in the first half of the 20th Century in the World War I era, and, even more in the buildup to US entry into World War II. The centrality of the rail industry, the conversion to massive war production on the eve of World War II translated to a hunger for labor power on the railroads in particular and US industry in general. Black workers, already a massive layer of the working class in the worst, and worst-paying, jobs, and their representatives and advocates, saw the opening to fight for decent jobs, paying union-scale, in the rapidly expanding war industries. For example, during World War I thousands of Blacks were hired as construction and maintenance laborers on northern rail lines. In fact, Black GIs returning from World War II and the Korean War, and the African American nationality as a whole in these post-war periods, were in no mood for settling into the old segregationist and humiliating status quo.

Stop the Whitewashing of Our History

In my 30-year railroad career, working as a brakeman-switchman, hostler, and locomotive engineer in Chicago, Washington, DC, and New York, for first the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad and then for Amtrak, I saw a transformation in the number of African-American and then women in the operating crafts. I remember being in the cab of the locomotive in the middle of some godforsaken stretch of Illinois countryside, or pulling a 150-car coal train from Chicago’s giant Proviso Yard to the gates of a northern Indiana power plant, listening to the stories of some of the first Black engineers that the carriers were forced to hire – and the craft unions gave up trying to exclude. These brothers related to me the bullshit they had to put up with initially, even as things began to get better and prejudices began to break down.

It would be very educational and useful if our unions today would confront this blot on our history and dignity as organizations of labor. This is long overdue. And not only for moral reasons.

I maintain that we need to know the history of our unions if we are going to transform them into instruments of struggle for the coming battles facing the working class in the United States today, in this new gilded age of obscene social inequality and squalid oligarchy in the United States.

This whitewashing of history really slapped me across the face when I received in the mail in 2013 a booklet celebrating the 150th Anniversary of my union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET), which is now a division of the Teamsters Union, and its predecessors the Brotherhood of the Footboard (founded in 1863) and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. There was not a single word in that small book about the segregationist, “whites only” bylaws and “covenants” that prevailed for 100 years!

I had once personally confronted BLET President Dennis Pierce about this, in a friendly way, when he attended a retirement party thrown by our Division 11 in New York City. Brother Pierce told me he was “appalled” at what he saw in the archives, including “whites only” covenants, but when I asked him why the history booklet sent to each member, glorifying the history of our union, there was not a single word on the decades-long blatant racism he fell back on the lame and cowardly rationalization that to include it in the 150th anniversary booklet and literature would be “divisive”! As if the real “division” were not the racist practices themselves.

Old Lessons, Current Realities

While the legacy of racist discrimination in the railroad industry – and in US social relations in general – have been dealt heavy blows in the past several decades, race hatred and demagogy remain a reference point for ultra-rightist forces and their allies (who are invariably anti-union) and a cutting-edge component in the current social and political polarization in US politics. These voices are trying to get a hearing for their reactionary viewpoints in the working class and our greatly weakened trade-union movement.

Since the financial crisis and so-called Great Recession of 2007-08 there were subsequent devastating attacks on the value of labor, employment, wages, and living standards under both Democratic and Republican White Houses and Congresses. The relative and slight uptick in GDP numbers today (famously manipulated and manipulatable), the balloon of the stock market, and slight increases in industrial production and manufacturing have been typically hyped by President Donald Trump – “this is the greatest economy in the history of America.” The actual economic figures (which are always “readjusted”) are significant and interesting mainly around the question of their sustainability. One key question: What will be the unintended consequences of the unfolding clashes over trade and tariffs between the United States, China, and the European Union? What will be the spillover effects, economically and politically, in Asia, Canada, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa?

Another curious fact that stands out for now is that wages for working people continue to stagnate and trend downward, with minor exceptions, despite the official low unemployment figures. Labor shortages in fast-food and other large-scale wholesale and retail operations such as Amazon, Walmart, and so on, along with militant drives by unorganized workers to fight for $15 an hour, have forced these outfits to grant some wage concessions.

Similarly, rank-and-file teachers, almost independent of their weak unions, forced state house to grant some wage relief (that is raises) with no strings attached in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona.

Brotherhoods of Color is well-written and comprehensive. I recommend it not only for its rich evocation of the past but because it contains many lessons for rail and other US workers of whatever “race” or skin tone, for the present and future. Workers, who are being drawn into today’s struggles and will by the millions be drawn into the giant, inevitable class battles that lay ahead in the USA.

Here’s a riddle: when is a campaign for equality not really about equality? When it’s in Israel, it seems.

Earlier this month, tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel – those belonging to the small Druze religious sect – staged a protest in Rabin Square in central Tel Aviv. They were joined by large numbers of Israeli Jews, including former senior security officers and the two largest centre-left parties in the parliamentary opposition, Zionist Union and Yesh Atid.

All expressed outrage at the country’s new Nation-State Basic Law, which gives constitutional backing to the principle that all Jews in the world enjoy a privileged status in Israel denied to the country’s native, non-Jewish population. The Basic Law also strips Arabic – the mother tongue of a fifth of Israel’s population – of its former status as an official language.

The crowd chanted “Equality! Equality!” and urged the repeal of a law that has been accused by legal groups of formalising a system of apartheid in Israel.

Fast forward a week, to the Saturday evening before last. Tens of thousands of Muslims and Christians – also part of the 1.8-million-strong Palestinian minority – staged their own protest at the same Tel Aviv location and at the same hour. They also called for equality and the repeal of the law. And yet this time only a smattering of Israeli Jews turned out to support them, while the Zionist Union and Yesh Atid parties actively boycotted the event.

What happened? What was so different about the first and second demonstrations?

Druze Delusions

The starkly contrasting reactions from Israeli Jews to the two protests neatly highlighted several things: the hypocrisy of a so-called Israeli left that claims to believe in equality; the widespread misunderstanding by most outsiders of what a Jewish state entails; and the delusions of a Druze community that thinks it is “owed” equality by a self-declared Jewish state.

Let’s start in reverse.

The Druze are incensed by the Basic Law because most believe they have demonstrated “loyalty” to Israel – to use an idea imposed on them by the state – through their service in the Israeli army.

Shortly after Israel was created on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland, Druze leaders were pressured into signing an agreement. It committed the small minority – less than two percent of Israel’s population – to three years of conscription.

Israeli Jews have been only too keen to showcase the Druze as proof that patriotic non-Jews can be “blood brothers” with Jews. The Druze, they claim, are evidence that a Jewish state is not racist, as it was characterised for many years by the United Nations General Assembly, or apartheid in nature, as a growing number of experts have concluded.

Of course, we should acknowledge there is a problem – at least for a state claiming to be a Western-style liberal democracy – in making rights for citizens conditional on their proving “loyalty”. But let us set that issue aside for the moment.

Divide and Rule

The Israeli Jewish public’s assumption that the Druze enjoy equal status in Israel was always fanciful self-deception. Israel selected the Druze to serve in the army not because they were “loyal” but because officials wanted to exploit them as part of a cynical divide-and-rule strategy.

After the incomplete ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948, which left small numbers of Palestinians inside the new Jewish state, the Israeli leadership wished to foment internal discord and suspicion among the remnants of the native population. It hoped to pit the tiny Palestinian Druze and Christian sects against the larger Palestinian Muslim sect.

Israel was able to strong-arm the vulnerable Druze community because their religious leadership was isolated and co-optable.

Israel tried a similar strategy with the Christians, as the Israeli historian Hillel Cohen has noted. The plan failed both because it was difficult to secure a common response from the leaders of a dozen or so diverse Christian denominations and because local Palestinian Christians preferred to emphasise their ties to overseas churches rather than becoming dependent on the Israeli military.

Israel, however, has not given up on that long-term goal. Just as Palestinian “Druze” were transformed by officials from a religion into a nationality to cultivate “loyalty”, so the state has encouraged – with much less success – Palestinian Christians to view themselves as a separate nation, one it has termed the “Aramaic” nation, in reference to the language of Jesus.

Seen from another perspective, Israel never had any intention of finding out whether the Muslim population wanted to be “loyal” to the state. There was never any conceivable scenario in which the Israeli military was going to train and arm the 80 percent of Palestinians who constituted the Muslim community. They were never going to be allowed near the inner workings of Israel’s military machine.

In short, the Druze are “loyal” to Israel only because Israel needed the Muslims to be “disloyal”.

Demolitions and discrimination

But the self-deception runs deeper. If Israel had actually made equal citizenship rights conditional on “loyalty”, as it claims, then Druze communities ought to have been treated the same way as Jewish communities. In fact, one could argue, they should have been treated better. The Druze have a higher rate of conscription than Jewish society, and proportionally more of them serve in combat roles, where they are in greater danger of being killed.

But, in reality, only a tiny number of Druze have been allowed to succeed, and then only as individuals. The Israeli media love to trumpet the triumphs of Amal Asad, the retired Druze general who has been leading the community’s protests for equality, or write headlines about the first female Druze judge or TV anchor, or the first Druze officer managing the occupation.

But for the vast majority of Druze men, military service qualifies them only to become fodder for Israel’s extensive security industries, working as security guards at shopping malls, or as low-ranking policemen and prison wardens.

They can hope for little more after a childhood spent in the segregated Druze education system. Historically, its matriculation rates have been low, even when compared with the dismal standards set in state schools provided for the rest of the Palestinian minority.

And judged in terms not of Druze individuals but of Druze communities, the picture is even worse.

Despite the community’s “loyalty”, notes Druze analyst Dalia Halabi, the Israeli state has seized some 70 percent of Druze lands – as it has done with the rest of the Palestinian minority – to build new communities exclusively for Jews. It demolishes homes in Druze communities where land and building permits are denied, while retroactively approving homes built in violation of Israeli law by Jewish settlers on private Palestinian land in the West Bank.

Today, Druze villages are as overcrowded, ghetto-like and underfunded as those of Christians and Muslims. There was no obvious reward for communal Druze “loyalty”.

Celebration of apartheid

The Druze may have been fooling themselves about their rights, but they have been far from alone. Much of the debate – and outrage – about the Basic Law outside Israel has been deeply wrong-headed.

The legislation changes very little in practice. Those, especially liberal Jews in the US and Europe, who fear that the new nation-state law has changed Israel do not understand what Israel was before. The crime committed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the far-right is not that they ended equality and introduced apartheid; it is that they drew attention to the existing situation of apartheid. They gave apartheid constitutional standing. They took apartheid out of the shadows and celebrated it.

This Basic Law has been in the drafting process for the best part of a decade. Over that period, the Zionist centre-left parties now calling for equality did not object to the proposed legislation because it would change things, but because they considered it “unnecessary” and “redundant”. The things the Basic Law codifies have existed since Israel’s birth.

In a recent interview, Yariv Levin, the tourism minister and a confidant of Netanyahu, made that clear. He explained that one important reason why equality was not enshrined in the new law was that it would have conflicted with the 1950 Law of Return, foundational legislation that made the new state the collective property not of citizens (which included a fifth who were Palestinian) but of Jews everywhere, even those outside Israel’s borders.

Having in 1948 denied the vast majority of Palestinians a right to return to their homes from which they had just been expelled, Israeli officials passed the Law of Return to open the floodgates, allowing every Jew in the world to come and settle in their stead.

Unequal from the start

Netanyahu, let’s remember, did not draft the Law of Return. It was the brainchild of Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, and his supposedly socialist Labor party.

In accordance with the Law of Return, Israel’s “liberal” Supreme Court has concurred that there is no “Israeli nation”, only a worldwide “Jewish nation” that has an automatic right to citizenship in Israel. This ethnic idea of “nationality” confers on Jews all sorts of additional rights denied to Palestinian citizens – a database by the legal group Adalah lists nearly 70 such laws.

The so-called Jewish nation’s ancestral home is, according to the state’s founding document drafted in 1948, the Declaration of Independence, the “Land of Israel”, not the “state of Israel”. The term, echoed in the Basic Law, evokes vague biblical boundaries that include parts of many neighbouring states, and most especially the occupied Palestinian territories.

Similarly, the clause in the new Basic Law encouraging Jews to “settle” the land was not conjured out of thin air by the Israeli far-right. Israel’s revered founding generation long ago invoked the idea of a “land without people” to justify Jewish settlement to “make the desert bloom”.

It was Ben-Gurion and his “civilising” socialist kibbutz movement that established “admissions committees” overseeing hundreds of communities across Israel to ensure no Palestinian citizens, whether Druze, Christian or Muslim, would ever be allowed inside. While 93 percent of Israel’s land was reserved for the “Jewish nation” – for world Jewry – Palestinian citizens were confined to little more than two percent of the land they had once called their homeland.

Hypocrisy of Israeli left

But if the Druze and outsiders allowed themselves to be misled, the masters of self-deception were the Israeli Jewish public, especially its leftist and centrist components, who are currently standing shoulder to shoulder with the Druze.

Strangely, given their passionate calls for equality for all citizens, these same Israeli Jews have long ignored the only political parties in the Israeli parliament whose programmes are committed to equality. In fact, not only have they ignored these parties, but they have accused them of sedition over their platforms for equality.

It was the Balad party that back in the late 90s first popularised the slogan that Israel should become a “state of all its citizens” – a state where all citizens had equal rights. But that party, led by Palestinian citizens, was ostracised by almost all Israeli Jews.

Later, in 2006, the Palestinian leadership in Israel produced a document, the Future Vision, which called for Israel to become a “consensual democracy”. How did Israel respond? Its intelligence services – led by officials who are now joining the Druze call for equality – termed the Future Vision “subversion”.

Azmi Bishara, a Palestinian Christian professor of philosophy and leader of Balad, was chased into exile, accused of treason. And Israeli Jews, from right to left, cheered on this campaign of vilification and incitement.

All this happened before Netanyahu led his current succession of right-wing governments from 2009 onwards. It was the centre-left, now apparently so sensitive to the principles of equality and democracy, that hounded the Palestinian parties’ campaign for democratic reform into the shadows.

Underscoring the hypocrisy, the Zionist Union and Yesh Atid parties, now so supportive of the Druze equality campaign, stood mutely by only two months ago when, in a “highly unusual” move, the Israeli parliament’s presidium disqualified Balad from even submitting legislation on a state of all its citizens.

It would be reassuring to think we are seeing the beginnings of a political awakening by the Israeli left and centre, that sections of the Israeli public are starting to reconsider their former ugly illiberalism. But sadly, all the evidence points in the opposite direction.

State OF Denial

The Israelis Jews who supported the Druze at the 4 August protest did so not because they believe in equality and liberal democracy, but because they want their ethnocracy – an ethnic state of privileges for Jews – to continue masquerading as a liberal democracy. Israeli Jews have allied with the Druze only insofar as it is necessary to maintain that illusion.

Meanwhile, almost the entire Israeli Jewish public has shunned the rest of the Palestinian minority because its demands for substantive equality threaten to force Israeli Jews out of their state of denial. That is why polls show that more than half of Israeli Jews express sympathy for the Druze struggle for equality, even as almost none are prepared to back the rest of the Palestinian minority when it makes the same demand.

A giant banner depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with “Crime Minsiter” inscribed on it, is spread on the ground as Israeli Arabs and their supporters protest against the ‘Jewish Nation-State Law’ in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv on August 11, 2018/ AFP PHOTO / Ahmad GHARABLI

A banner depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with ‘Crime Minister’ inscribed on it, as part of a protest in Tel Aviv on 11 August (AFP)

A decade ago, the far-right politician Avigdor Lieberman, now the defence minister, started campaigning under the slogan “No citizenship without loyalty”. His threat was that, unless the Palestinian minority started to prove their loyalty by becoming Zionists and serving in the army, he would strip them of citizenship.

Lieberman’s political platform hit a major hurdle. According to international law, states cannot leave sections of their population stateless by revoking citizenship. But Lieberman’s efforts have paid off nonetheless, as these latest events prove.

Through their highly circumscribed support for equality – for Druze but not other Palestinian citizens – Israeli Jews have made clear their unquestioning acceptance of what “loyalty” entails.

Israeli citizens are not supposed to be loyal to a democratic principle, or universal human rights, or even the welfare of their compatriots. In Israel, “loyal” citizens are required to bow down before the Jewishness of the state and uphold the values of Jewish supremacism, even if it means their own permanent abasement.

The white race – and I mean Israeli, Iberian, Slovak, Anglo-Saxon, Caucasian, and the lot of us – is crazy. We do not need Susan Sontag to declare the white race as cancer on the world to ramify the point, since it’s been more than 50 years since she declared:

If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. This is a painful truth; few of us want to go that far. … The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.

The zenith of this insanity, of course, encompasses the world leaders of all those European nations, the UK, Australia, that demented cabal in Tel Aviv, the amazing daft of Americanos, and the entire lot who works the wormhole of destruction and continuing hollowing out with that soft shoe power of money, might and ethos that states “we don’t need no stinking ethics . . . and we kill the world at will.”

I’m working daily with homeless veterans, and the reality of what it means to have Trump or Clinton or Bernie or any of them in the leeching single party of Demons-RepubliRats running the show is that it’s a prostitute’s game of the highest order: homeless with property debts, evictions, miles and miles of contracts to pay back worthless schooling (degrees), mental health not being treated, crimes invented and prosecuted against them, endless toil in lines of bureaucracy, the trauma of substance abuse and then sobriety, the end game of just wanting to get a cheap house to call home to fortify against the constant chatter of the money launderers and repo men.

Reality is Americans in large part are broken, man, and their progeny are a hop, skip and a jump from disability classification, as each new birth is a crap-shoot of this or that physiological, genetic and mental impingement. Debilitating and lifelong scarlet letters of Double D-B-C-E at birth stitched on their Triple X sleeveless Budweiser T-shirts.

Disabled/Debt-ridden, Broken/Blank-Bankrupted, and Crippled/Corrupted, Epigenetic/ER-prone, at birth, as the psychological torturers bring to us more and more hormone-disrupting, DNA-warping, mental-draining and spiritual-tapping goods and services that have shackled us to a system of obsolescence, delusion, propaganda, and penury. We are not a united nation of anything but belief in the cartoonish ideology we are Number One and Ever-Conquering, yet the Chinese-made bombs bursting in air, hormone-drenched spare ribs, and GMO/pesticide-infused high fructose corn syrup Everything Goes Better with CocaCola on that one static day, July 4, push us to believe the lies, the big lie and the impending extinction of our own history.

Pondering the universe of delusional thinking, I am only 61, yet I feel like Rip Van Winkle, or worse, living my last third of life (if I get that lucky) inside the slipstream of human depravity on every level – from the bowels of the belly of the beast, to the syphilitic thinking of the star chamber levelers with their billions, their bots, their vision of a world tied to their modified DNA strains, existing someplace floating on ten thousand tethered space stations, near the reflection of their apple of their Dystopian eye, Mars.

A world colluding with the masters of consumption, addiction to fossil fuels, chemicals, wars, brain-barrier hacking entertainment, and the concomitant insanity of carving away species after species, while polluting precious fresh water, razing coral reefs, over-harvesting oceans, and living lifestyles where the cracked calories of cooked HomoConsumpithectus’ food and the endless pitching withdrawals of HomoRetailopithectus’ proclivity to sex, drugs, gambling, shopping, stupidity will forever shape the death of Earth’s ecosystems as we have known them up close and personal and through the bio-paleo-chemical microscopic records we have set as marching orders for our scientists and ecologists who are inevitably ignored at every turn of the Point Zero One Percent’s gluttony and narcissism.

The dream and the hope are now a requiem, lost on the flow of sperm through the epididymis, as we further unlock the barriers to a healthy society: how even the lumbering, pigsty physiology of the progenitor sperm donator HomoConsumopithectus can express the further quickening of the zygote’s snowball’s chance in hell gestating into anything but a cancer-seeded, on-the-spectrum, continual chronic fatigue syndrome child.

The number of people on planet earth – not just in the Chronic Exceptional Diseased America – with chronic illness and dripping concentration and retrograde humanity – is huge, largely tied to the superstition of fascist religion and unending exploitation of each square acre of god’s green earth. This new normal of fear-at-birth and flagging-constitutions whereby the human race is racing away from the solutions to the disease of the mind and the pollution of land-atmosphere-air-water is not only unholy and denuding of spirit, but exactly what the Captains of Industry and Masters of the Gigabytes and Algorithms desire.

Choices, man: flipping burgers or humping backpacks in the US Military; lifetime debt for meaningless college degrees or the drudgery of working two or three jobs in the service and precarious economy; dealing into the game of American Castes or isolating in a world of addiction, pollution and surveillance?

Choices turning Americans into spies and enemies, suckers and marks, a deployed army of tens of millions ball-and-chained to the disease of fearing a worthy death in order to overthrow the powers, the militaries, and the mad men and women crafting the biggest lies since a resurrection and second coming.

Oddly, working with homeless veterans battling meth, opioids, booze, PTSD, disabilities from military service, and a cart-load of criminal convictions, I still come out daily with a sense of purpose and confidence that one man, one woman, can do something revolutionary, even in this I-Spy Sicko World of Plastic Futures. It’s the forest, not the single tree, that is diseased. The unending stupidity of the collective, whereby we allow the mighty dollar to hold sway over everything – trillions spent on the military’s implements of welfare/warfare while our collective mouths rot; the millions upon millions of babies born with birth defects and learning disabilities because we can’t muster up a collective” Hell No We Aren’t Going to Take These” chemicals sprayed on and in everything.

A study in mice conducted by researchers at Tufts University School of Medicine (TUSM) suggests that a woman’s risk of anxiety and dysfunctional social behavior may depend on the experiences of her parents, particularly fathers, when they were young. The study, published online in Biological Psychiatry, suggests that stress caused by chronic social instability during youth contributes to epigenetic changes in sperm cells that can lead to psychiatric disorders in female offspring across multiple generations.

Obese male mice and normal weight female mice produce female pups that are overweight at birth through childhood, and have delayed development of their breast tissue as well as increased rates of breast cancer.

The findings, published online June 24 in Scientific Reportsby Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers, come from one of the first animal studies to examine the impact of paternal obesity on future generations’ cancer risk.

The researchers say they’ve found evidence that obesity changes the microRNA (miRNA) signature—epigenetic regulators of gene expression—in both the dad’s sperm and the daughter’s breast tissue, suggesting that miRNAs may carry the epigenetic information from obese dads to their daughters.

We are looking at a globe that navel gazes at these cretins – Multimillionaire Obamas, Clintons, Bush, and the deadly misanthropic billionaires club of the Gates-Bezos-Trump-Adelson- et al, and the dirty dealings of Madison Avenue, Wall Street, Holly-Dirt and the like. The attention span is square on the Tweet or the argumentative average American who will question a thousand PhDs working on climate change with his or her community college education.

So, no matter how homogenized the elites’ churned-out mush is, for instance, proclaiming how the world is so much less violent now than fifty years ago (another troll, Stephen Pinker), the reality is the white race is bent on hobbling the rest of the world with the pollution, indentured servant status, and disease creation to feed the most violent time in history of constant structural violence, mass incarceration, mass delusion, mass toxin-creating, hyper-caste generating. We are here, in a process of withering away, slowly, as this Tinhorn Country pokes holes in any common fabric the world holds sacred.

Stephen Pinker is wrong about the World of Enlightened Peoples Is Less Violent, easily beaten down here by a splendid writer:

There is something repellently absurd in the notion that war is a vice of “backward” peoples. Destroying some of the most refined civilizations that have ever existed, the wars that ravaged south-east Asia in the second world war and the decades that followed were the work of colonial powers. One of the causes of the genocide in Rwanda was the segregation of the population by German and Belgian imperialism. Unending war in the Congo has been fueled by western demand for the country’s natural resources. If violence has dwindled in advanced societies, one reason may be that they have exported it.

Then again, the idea that violence is declining in the most highly developed countries is questionable. Judged by accepted standards, the United States is the most advanced society in the world. According to many estimates the US also has the highest rate of incarceration, some way ahead of China and Russia, for example. Around a quarter of all the world’s prisoners are held in American jails, many for exceptionally long periods. Black people are disproportionately represented, many prisoners are mentally ill and growing numbers are aged and infirm. Imprisonment in America involves continuous risk of assault by other prisoners. There is the threat of long periods spent in solitary confinement, sometimes (as in “supermax” facilities, where something like Bentham’s Panopticon has been constructed) for indefinite periods – a type of treatment that has been reasonably classified as torture. Cruel and unusual punishments involving flogging and mutilation may have been abolished in many countries, but, along with unprecedented levels of mass incarceration, the practice of torture seems to be integral to the functioning of the world’s most advanced state.

Funny stuff, that which precipitates my noggin: Was reading this writer’s (Karl Schroeder) take on what it means to Escape the Default Future When Writing Science Fiction:

There’s a term that futurists use: “the default future.” The default future is what we assume is going to happen, as a matter of obvious fact. Its assumptions are so deeply ingrained that we don’t even know they’re there. For instance, current popular culture typically imagines one of just three possible future Earths: an Orwellian dystopia, a post-apocalyptic wasteland, or a space-faring urban hypercivilization.

But should we? Sharing the wealth among nine billion will be hard. In many nations, birth-rates are on the decline. Shouldn’t we encourage that trend?

Here’s a proposal: let’s get smaller. Imagine a future where the economy is increasingly automated and taps into the infinite resources of outer space; and where humanity shares a core of common goods such as Universal Basic Income, Universal Healthcare, and free education. These aren’t fantasies, they’re trends. Now add to this mix a naturally declining population that retains its genetic diversity. The formula for our future becomes: more and more wealth, divided among fewer and fewer people.

In material terms alone, the results are staggering. Imagine if your family owned Paris? Or was responsible for tending the Catskill Mountains? What does wealth mean when robotics, automation and AI mean that each person can have, not money or an income, but his or her own economy? When kids learn history by reenacting the Battle of the Somme with real robot armies? When you don’t watch movies, you have the entire story including sets, car chases and crowd scenes, played out for you by troops of android players?

And here we are, these elitists and thought experimenters, sticking their intellectual tongues out at us, the majority of us, 6 billion-plus, pontificating about a world that is less violent or one that can be depopulated for a cool million, or how better the world is with a point-zero-zero-one Percent controlling us with their flimflam ideas, their products, their tools of oppression, their war is peace simulated psycho-babble. We are subject to their whims, their marketing, and their disease-generating ideologies — arrogance, chauvinism, immorality, all things filtered through the American lens/ White Race’s Lens, that is.

So I come to the end of this screed, precipitated by the daily sin of living and working in America as my fellow Americans (sic) become more and more punch drunk crazy on their own self-admiration. But also catalyzed by some insipid article,

New archaeological research from The Australian National University (ANU) has found that Homo erectus, an extinct species of primitive humans, went extinct in part because they were ‘lazy’.

The premise is that Homo erectus failed to mine better materials to be more efficient (killers) and more widely spread-out hunters. Ironically, the fool’s errand is we as a society/ dominator civilization are absolutely lazy when it comes to our daftness around this collapsing planet, dying ecosystems and soon-to-be-extinct millions of species. Climate change and mitigating that existential crisis, which we have failed tremendously at, we have proven our Homo Sapiens ilk as both lazy and lazier than any Homo erectus that may have been eliminated by more warring and consumptive species, now, HomoConsumpithectus.

Terms like least effort strategies and they did not have that sense of wonder we have come from this Australian anthropologist’s mouth in his dusting off of Homo erectus gathering sites.

The arrogance of this thinking, that they — Homo erectus — knew the better stone was there but decided against it because they felt they had enough adequate raw materials and decided against rarefied tool making. He goes on to say that the stone tool makers of later periods, including early Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, “who were climbing mountains to find good quality stone and transporting it over long distances,” outstripped our progenitor clan Homo erectus as survivors.

Shipton (the Aussie) states this is a failure to progress technologically, and as their environment dried out into a desert, the Homo erectus species’ population’s demise was inevitable.

Ironic, really, now as we Homo/Retail/Consumo-Sapiens have worked so hard to rape the planet and chug out toxins and greenhouse gases that we are failing more than any other past species in our line to grapple with this greenhouse gas inevitability —

The study, “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” was published in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As for what to do to prevent a hothouse Earth, it’s easier said than done: Decarbonize the world economy, end deforestation, improve farming techniques and promote carbon-capture technologies, among other recommendations.

This can “only be achieved and maintained by a coordinated, deliberate effort by human societies to manage our relationship with the rest of the Earth system, recognizing that humanity is an integral, interacting component of the system,” according to the study. “Humanity is now facing the need for critical decisions and actions that could influence our future for centuries, if not millennia.”

This is August 2018, and yet, my slipstream life intersects daily sometimes dozens of times with the chauvinism of partial truths, counter-intuitive stasis, collective unknowing, and frequent mistruths.

I have new ways to teach and work with this blind thinking, but in one sense, I find the white race in America log-jammed, and even around sincere and fairly robustly interested folk, there are blind sides.

Imagine, we eat apples year round. Sometimes apples in the store are 14 months old, meaning we are tricked into eating foods out of season, out of our own bio-region. Apples are picked, then warehoused away in a place where oxygen is cut back to a low percentage, the temperature is just a touch above 32 degrees, and the skins sprayed on with fungicides. The problem is that these apples lose their antioxidant power quickly — polyphenols.

The apple is a microcosm of the entire broken system of addiction to oil, embedded energy out the roof, bad choices, and what that Australian anthropologist might want to look at sociologically by seeing his own species, and his own brethren — science and technology — as the perpetrators of humanity’s demise. But, oh, we are a busy-busy species, making those Homo erectus die-offs look like the ultimate slackers!

There are few places in Israel where its apartheid character is more conspicuous than the imposing international airport just outside Tel Aviv, named after the country’s founding father, David Ben Gurion.

Most planes landing in Israel have to circle over the West Bank before making their descent. Below, more than two million Palestinians living under cruel Israeli occupation are barred from using the airport. Instead, they depend on capricious decisions from military officers on whether they will be allowed to cross a land border into Jordan.

They are comparatively better off than nearly two million more Palestinians in besieged Gaza, who are denied even that minimal freedom.

Meanwhile, a similar number of Palestinians living ostensibly as citizens inside Israel have to run a gauntlet of racial profiling checks before they can board a flight.

Armed security guards at the perimeter entrance listen for Hebrew spoken with an Arab accent. Passports are branded with barcodes that can entail humiliating interrogations, delays, strip searches and security escorts on to planes.

Security alone could never have justified the arbitrary and sweeping nature of these decades-old practices against Israel’s largely quiescent Palestinian minority.

Racial profiling at the airport was always chiefly about controlling and intimidating Palestinians, collecting information on them and ghettoising them. Palestinians struggled to get out while Arabs and Muslims struggled to get in.

But these efforts to “lock in” Palestinians have become all but futile in recent years as globalisation has shrunk the world. Prevent a Palestinian attending a conference in New York or Paris and they will deliver their talk via Skype instead.

But the controls long endured by Palestinians and Arabs are now being turned more aggressively against other kinds of supporters. With escalating criticism worldwide and the rapid growth of an international boycott movement, the circle of people Israel wishes to “lock out” is growing rapidly.

For foreigners, Ben Gurion airport is the gateway not only to Israel but to the occupied territories. It is the main way they can witness firsthand the appalling conditions Israel has imposed on many millions of Palestinians.

There is an ever-growing list of academics, lawyers, human rights groups, political advocates for ending the occupation and boycott supporters detained by Israel on arrival and subjected to questioning about their political views. Afterwards they are denied entry or required to keep out of the occupied territories.

In an ever more interconnected world, Israel can identify those it wants to exclude simply by scouring Twitter or Facebook.

The problem for Israel is that increasingly those most critical of it include Jews.

That should be no surprise. If Israel argues that it represents Jews everywhere, some may feel they have a right to speak out in protest. Recent polls suggest that an ideological gulf is opening up between Israel and many of the Jews overseas it claims to speak for.

The latest victim of Israel’s political profiling is Peter Beinart, a prominent American-Jewish commentator. He regularly appears on CNN, contributes to prestigious US publications and is a columnist for the Jewish weekly Forward.

Last week Mr Beinart revealed that he had been detained on landing at Ben Gurion, separated from his wife and children and “interrogated about my political activities” for an hour. After repeated assurances that he was simply attending a family bar mitzvah, officials allowed him in.

Mr Beinart is no Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein, dissident Jewish thinkers who have harshly criticised Israel’s policies – and been denied entry as a result.

His views echo those of many liberal American Jews no longer willing to turn a blind eye to Israel’s systematic abuses of Palestinians. In detaining him, Israel effectively declared that it no longer represents millions of Jews overseas. It made clear that the core message of Zionism – that Israel was created as a sanctuary for all Jews – is no longer true.

The right-wing government of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants fealty from Jews overseas – public support, donations, lobbying on domestic governments – but not their opinions.

Further, Mr Netanyahu’s Israel wants Jewry divided, with Israel determining which Jews are considered good and which bad. The measure of their virtue is no longer their support for a Jewish state but blind allegiance to the occupation and a Greater Israel lording it over Palestinians.

That divide is increasingly apparent inside Israel too, with growing numbers of dissident Israeli Jews reporting that they have been pulled aside for questioning on landing at Ben Gurion. They are being explicitly warned off political activism, in a setting intended to imply that their continued citizenship should not be taken for granted.

After an outcry over Mr Beinart’s detention, Netanyahu made a formulaic apology, calling his treatment an “administrative error”.

Few believe him. Israel’s liberal daily Haaretz called it the latest “systematic error”. The paper argued that in the “best tradition of benighted regimes”, Israel had drawn up “blacklists to silence criticism and to intimidate those who don’t toe the line”.

Certainly, the current questioning and bullying – not as passengers prepare to board a flight but as they arrive in Israel – has little to do with security, any more than it does when Palestinians and other Arabs are abused at the airport.

Rather, Mr Netanyahu wants to send a loud message to progressive Jews in Israel and abroad: “You are no longer automatically considered part of the Zionist project. We will judge whether you are friend or foe.”

That is intended to have a chilling effect on progressive Jews and send the message that, if they want to visit family in Israel or attend a wedding, funeral or a bar mitzvah, they should stay loyal or keep quiet. From now on, they must understand that they are being monitored on social media.

These are just the opening salvos in the Israeli right’s war against Jewish dissent. It is a slope liberal Jews will find gets ever more slippery.

Israel’s small Druze community, long seen as “loyal” to the state, is on a collision course with the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu over a new law guaranteeing superior citizenship rights for Jews, according to analysts.

Israel has traditionally cited the Druze, a secretive religious sect whose men serve in the Israeli army, as proof that non-Jews can prosper inside a self-declared Jewish state.

However, recent days have seen an unprecedented outpouring of anger from large segments of the Druze community over a nation-state law passed last month by the Israeli parliament.

The new legislation has been widely criticised for making explicit the privileged status of the Jewish majority while omitting any reference to “democracy” or “equality”.

One Druze scholar, Rabah Halabi, said his community’s response had been like a mini-“intifada” – the word Palestinians used for two lengthy uprisings against the occupation.

“Much of the Druze community are in a state of shock,” he told Middle East Eye. “They thought that by proving their loyalty, they would be treated as equals. But now they are being forced to re-evaluate, to accept that this view was mistaken.”

Halabi, who has written a book on Druze identity, added: “Their illusions are being shattered. It looks like a process of awakening has begun that will leave both sides bruised.”

Protesters call for equality

The new law, which has a constitutional-like status, has angered the fifth of Israel’s population that are not Jewish, mostly descended from Palestinians who survived a campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1948. This Palestinian minority eventually received citizenship.

But unlike the Muslim and Christian communities, the 120,000-strong Druze sect in Israel has long been showcased as “loyal” and plays a key role in the army, especially in combat duties in the occupied territories.

Druze leaders have angrily pointed to the disproportionate sacrifices made by their community, including more than 420 Druze killed while in uniform.

The Druze also enjoy outsized influence in Israeli politics. Although comprising about 1.5 percent of Israel’s population, they have five legislators in the 120-member parliament, four of them in Netanyahu’s ruling coalition.

Unusually, the figurehead of the protests has been a retired and much-decorated Druze general, Amal Asad.

He led the speakers at a rally in Tel Aviv earlier this month, attended by some 60,000 Druze and Israeli Jewish sympathisers, including many former senior security officials.

The protesters demanded that the new Basic Law – one of a body that serves as Israel’s equivalent of a constitution – be annulled or amended to confer equal rights on all citizens.

Crowds chanted “Equality! Equality!” and banners bore the slogan: “If we are brothers, we must be equals.”

Netanyahu blindsided

Druze legislators and Palestinian leadership organisations in Israel have separately petitioned the Israeli supreme court to overturn the legislation. The court is not expected to hear the cases until early next year.

Adalah, a legal rights group for the Palestinian minority, has described the law as having “apartheid characteristics” and noted that there is “no [other] constitution in the world that does not include the right to equality for all its citizens and residents”.

The Druze protests appear to have blindsided Netanyahu and his cabinet, even though the law was under consideration for nearly a decade.

Nonetheless, he has stood his ground. According to analysts, the law is the centrepiece of his efforts to win elections, expected in the coming months, as he tries to face down intensifying corruption investigations.

In a sign of his hardline approach, Netanyahu walked out of a meeting held shortly before the rally when Druze leaders – including Asad, Tarif and several mayors – refused to accept a compromise that would have offered special benefits to the Druze while keeping the law unchanged.

Wahib Habish, mayor of the Druze town of Yarka in the Galilee, who attended the meeting, told the Israeli media afterwards: “We can’t be bought off with benefits and rhetoric on closing gaps.”

Amal Jamal, a politics professor at Tel Aviv University and a Druze resident of Habish’s town, said Netanyahu’s strategy was to stoke “internal divisions” in Druze society.

“He has no intention of backing down,” he told MEE. “He hopes to dismiss the protests by saying: ‘If the Druze can’t agree among themselves, how is it possible for us to find a solution?’”

Secretive religious sect

The Druze are a secretive religious sect that broke away from Islam some 1,000 years ago. For protection, they chose to live in a mountainous region of the Middle East that is today split between Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.

Scholars have noted that, as a survival strategy, the Druze traditionally preferred to ally with whoever was in power.

Some Druze communities in the Galilee supported Zionist forces during the 1948 war that founded Israel on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland. A few years later, the Druze leadership in Israel signed a pact with the state, agreeing that the community’s men would be conscripted for three years into the army.

In return, Israel recognised the Druze as a “national” group, rather than as a religion, separating them from the rest of the Palestinian minority.

Complicating the picture, a much smaller Druze population fell under Israeli rule in 1967 when Israel occupied the Golan Heights, part of Syria. The 25,000 Druze in the Golan have mostly stayed loyal to Syria and refused Israeli citizenship. They are not drafted.

‘Brainwashed’ at school

Jamal said sections of Israeli Druze society were increasingly wondering whether they had paid a “double price” for their agreement to conscription.

“Not only were the Druze discriminated against like other Arab citizens, but they sacrificed their lives on the battlefield too,” he noted. “Look at it this way, the Druze are not just second-class citizens, they are second-class Arabs.”

As part of the agreement, Israel introduced a separate school system for the Druze in the 1970s, which has encouraged them to view their military service as a “covenant of blood” with the Jewish people.

Dalia Halabi, herself Druze and the executive director of Dirasat, a policy research centre in Nazareth, said the Druze education system was among the worst in Israel for matriculation rates. Instead, Israel had used the schools to “brainwash” Druze children.

“The Druze are taught to fear other Arabs, not only their neighbours in the Galilee but in the wider region,” she said. “They are encouraged to believe that they would be vulnerable and alone without the protection of the Israeli army.”

Refusal movement growing

Israel has long trumpeted the Druze’s military service as proof that it is possible for non-Jewish minorities to integrate.

Druze analysts consulted by MEE, however, noted that for many years there had been an intensifying split within the Druze community on the issue of military service that the new Basic law had brought to a head.

A refusal movement among young Druze men has become more prominent over the past decade, as have complaints that successive Israeli governments failed to make good on promises to give the Druze equal rights.

Druze communities are generally as overcrowded and poorly resourced as other Palestinian communities in Israel, noted Dalia Halabi: “Some 70 percent of Druze lands were confiscated by the state, despite our communities’ ‘loyalty’. They did not get a better deal than other Palestinian communities.”

Rabah Halabi, who teaches at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, pointed out that the loss of their farmland left many Druze men dependent on Israel’s extensive security economy.

More than a quarter are recruited after army service as security guards, prison wardens or border policemen, the latter a paramilitary force operating inside Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, he said.

“For a substantial section of Druze youth, army service is the only way to ensure a career. It is primarily an economic issue for them.”

Army officers resign

The new Basic Law has inflamed these existing tensions by enshrining privileges for Jewish citizens in a range of key areas, including immigration rights, access to land, and in housing and budgets. It also downgrades Arabic, stripping it of its status as an official language.

In an unprecedented move for a Druze leader, Asad, the general leading the protests, warned on social media that the Basic Law risked laying the foundations for “apartheid”. He called the measure “evil and racist”.

The groundswell of anger was apparent too at a recent awards ceremony attended by Avi Dichter, a former head of Israel’s Shin Bet domestic intelligence service and one of the architects of the law. He needed protection as Druze protesters publicly confronted him, denouncing him as a “traitor” and “Nazi”.

Several Druze army officers have resigned and others have threatened to stop serving, sparking fears of mass insubordination.

Druze leaders have so far refused to cooperate with a special ministerial committee set up by Netanyahu to advance a solution for the Druze, as well as a tiny Circassian community and sections of the Bedouin that also serve.

It seems likely to propose extra benefits on an individual basis for Palestinian citizens who serve in the army.

Jamal, of Tel Aviv University, said: “There are many Druze who have invested in this so-called ‘historical bond’ and do not want to lose their special status.

“But at the same time they can’t accept the deal Netanyahu is offering of perks for army service. They don’t want to look like they have been bought off with money, to seem like mercenaries.”

‘We’re not going anywhere

Unless one side backs down, the Druze community now looks set for a major clash with the government for the first time in the country’s history.

A recent poll indicated that 58 percent of Israeli Jews support the law, though a similar number expressed sympathy for Druze concerns.

Ayelet Shaked, the justice minister, has already warned of “an earthquake” on the political right if the courts dare to annul the law.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu has appeared in no mood for compromise. After his meeting with Druze leaders broke up in acrimony, his officials implied that General Asad and his supporters were disloyal.

Channel 2 TV quoted a source close to Netanyahu stating, apparently in reference to Asad and his followers: “Whoever doesn’t like it [the Basic Law], there’s a large Druze community in Syria, and they’re invited to found the state of Druzistan there.”

Dalia Halabi observed: “Netanyahu is fanning the flames because he assumes the Druze will agree to whatever he says. He thinks we now have no option but to be loyal.”

But Mano Abu Salha, aged 58 from Yarka, and among those who attended the mass demonstration in Tel Aviv, told MEE that Netanyahu would be proved wrong.

He said: “We didn’t come from Syria. We are living on our historic lands and we’re not going anywhere. We are the native population. Netanyahu better realise that we are staying put and will fight for our rights.”

I think that most of us instinctively avoid people with mental illness.

I think in many ways what my films are about is that search for my grandpa’s dentures: for that humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between “us” and “them” to arrive at a “we.”
—Brian Lindstrom, documentarian

I first had my real run-in’s with “the law,” in Tucson, Arizona. Pima County Sheriff’s deputies in three vehicles were chasing me on my Bultaco 360cc, as I was cutting through dirt roads and gullies as a 15-year-old unlicensed motocrosser. The mayhem those deputies created, going after me as if I was a mass murderer.

It took six months and probably a few snitches at my high school before the knock on the classroom door of my physics class when the vice principal and two deputies greeted me. The two weaponized cops, in the hallway, handcuffed me and walked me away.

I was charged with driving a motorcycle without a license, along with 18 moving violations.

All of the charges were dropped, as my mother was well-connected to both Tucson Police Department captains and the chief of police, as well as a senator in the Arizona legislature.

Bottom line was the deputies were humiliated, over a one-year period, by my smart-ass ripping up the desert and eluding them. Without evidence that I was actually the one on the Bultaco each time I eluded them, the judge threw the cases out the window while admonishing me to wear a helmet and get a license.

It didn’t take much longer in my life to have more interfaces with cops, as I became the police reporter for both the college daily in Tucson and eventually several dailies and weeklies in Southern Arizona along the US-Mexico border.

My first real live reporter’s story on a cop shooting was when I had to cover a killing of a person with bipolar effective disorder who was in distress near Ajo, Arizona. A mother calls 911 about her son, a Vietnam veteran, drinking a lot and standing in their fenced yard talking to and yelling at ghosts. He had a six-inch Buck knife, and a tall boy PBR in the other hand. Deputy skids to a stop, comes out of the patrol car, pulls his gun, and while in a shoot-to-kill stance, mind you, on the other side of the clear demarcation of the property line to the son and mother’s double-wide trailer and shed set up, he shouts at the man to put the knife down and lay on the 120 degree desert ground with fingers laced and around his head.

The mother pleads to the cop to just back off, to not yell; her son yells back, cussing out this dude, telling him, “Don’t you come onto our property or I’ll stick you.” One thing leads to another, the distressed man charges, while still in his yard, the four-foot high fence between the police official and him. The deputy yells stop, and the Vietnam veteran tells him to fuck off and get away.

At the property line, on his family’s side of the line, the veteran waves his beer and his knife. Fifteen seconds later, the cop fires three rounds, pumping metal into the 42-year-old’s chest.

That was my first foray into investigating police policies around distressed and mentally deranged and emotionally flagging citizens.

One way to end the mental health crisis is to “shoot them out of existence” said one asshole El Paso deputy to me off the record.

Jump cut almost four decades later: Portland, Oregon. Pearl District. Daytime. Man who is deathly afraid of police is confronted by cops, runs away, is subdued, and in less than 120 minutes from the point of confrontation and while in police custody, said perpetrator is dead.

Watching Brian Lindstrom’s Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse, I am reminded of my forty plus years in and around cops, with mentally distressed clients, as a social worker with homeless and re-entry and veteran clients, and as a teacher in many alternative high school programs, community college, prisons, with military students, and with adults living with developmental disabilities.

I viewed the five year old film with homeless veterans and their family members in Beaverton, Oregon. Three in the audience (including me) had heard of the James Chasse case of Portland Police slamming to the pavement a skinny 42-year-old while also kicking him, applying a Taser, and hogtying the man with schizophrenia and letting him turn ashen gray while standing around sipping Starbucks.

Lindstrom’s film is powerful on many levels, notwithstanding the filmmaker’s ability to ply through the historical record to humanize this interesting and buoyant son who was known around Portland for many years. The quintessential peeling back of the biographical onion peel is what’s compelling about the filmmaker’s approach.

With Alien Boy, our main goal was to honor Jim and really to kind of restore the depth and dimension to Jim’s life. We wanted to restore his humanity and depth. When he died his whole existence was reduced to this headline, 42 Year Old Man with Schizophrenia Dies in Police Custody, and that’s just such a desolate interpretation of his life. Actually, it’s really just an interpretation of his death not of his life. So we painstakingly researched his life, and found friends, family, his old girlfriend, his neighbors, all these people that could talk about him and give him the kind of fullness he deserved. He lived a life of hardship. He was dealt a hard hand but he played it well. He had a lot of integrity and drive. He built a meaningful life and we really wanted to show that in the film.

Mr. Chasse was living in an SRO (subsidized single room occupancy apartment) in downtown Portland, with his own little space from where he positioned his life to survive the voices and the hardships a schizophrenic lives through attempting to be accepted and left alone as an atypical in a neuro-normal and highly judgmental world.

The promontory idea my audience participants who viewed the film expressed was how a person who lives their life disheveled and as a loner with obvious atypical clothing and demeanor can end up at the blunt end of the macho and violent world of a police force. What is really compelling are the eyewitnesses to the event – people who did not know James at the time of the brutal and misanthropic and cavalier way he was meted out injustice – and the stake they had in reviving the 42-year-old’s humanity.

As is the case in all these incidents of police brutality, overreach, and killing, the victims are rarely treated as sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, uncle and aunts, friends and neighbors. They are un-people, aliens, reduced to their prior run-ins with the law, their rap sheets, their mental states, and their resistance.

Lindstrom takes this case, and builds a life, and in the process of reportage, he is able to elicit the emotive power of those of us bearing witness to injustice, a crime against humanity, and any warped expression of the human condition vis-à-vis a cliquish and many times felonious police force. Bearing witness, we as the documentary’s viewers are compelled to see a man, Jim, whose origins are a boy, a child, a son, a boyfriend, a character in the community, and a citizen of not only Portland, Oregon, but of the world.

James Chasse, Jr., was a fixture in the early punk rock scene in Portland, and Lindstrom allows a kaleidoscope of memories to enter the milieu of his film. One might expect the fury of the chase, or the fear of a dark alley and known crack dealer’s crib. In the case of James Chasse, Jr., he was minding his business in his grimy state in an upscale part of Portland. That was his crime.

“I think we’re used to viewing a lot of police tragedies that are unfortunate one-time decisions about pulling a trigger,” Lindstrom says. “What’s so disturbing about this [case] is that the film reveals this cascade of deceits, omissions, and lies that lead to this terrible death, which was preventable.”

Alien Boy premiered in February 2013 at the Portland International Film Festival after six years of production. The architectonics of the film peers back into our own souls – many of us have experienced videotaped depositions, court documents, and witness interviews up close. September 17, 2006 police approached Chasse, believing he was behaving suspiciously. Herein lies the universal truth of community police forces – if you run away, you most probably will be maimed or injured by officers.

In the case of Jim, he ended up with two dozen breaks on 16 ribs. The policemen signed a waiver denying the EMT unit authority to send him to a hospital.

I’ve seen this shit in Guatemala, in Mexico, in El Paso and Spokane – a hog-tied and writhing-in-pain screaming suspect thrown in a cell, whereupon the person stops breathing or has a seizure, and then slow-to-respond jailers and deputies load the suspect into a police vehicle headed for a hospital. Jim’s level of pain was captured on video and audio, and the viewer sees the brutality of group think in the jailer-cop mindset as people stand around inside the Multnomah County Detention Center as the dying Jim Jim went white and cyanic.

Jim was dumped in a squad car where the cop who pounded him to the pavement drove him to Providence Medical Center. He died in transit, a few minutes away from the emergency room.

This film does not hearken back to some episode of Law and Order, and instead we get a wonderful and human portrait of not an alien, but a life of a man who was a seeker of art as musician, writer, and cartoonist.

Here’s the rub – men and women can live lives of dignity and worth even with mental illness and the so-called hearing voices effects of schizoid disorders. They have friends, they believe in things, they are many times artists, and they can be creative and have meaningful relationships. Lindstrom calls Jim Jim “an amazing success story … a beautiful, sensitive, fragile-yet-resilient nature.”

As a practitioner in the social services world, I have worked with hundreds of people who are looked upon by mainstream society as broken, damaged, suspect and unworthy of all the rights embedded in a democracy, part and parcel what it means to be a citizen. I’ve had clients who lived in the same subsidized apartment building Chasse lived in. This world of neuro-atypical people living in our communities is a success story when social services and the full suite of programs come in and help people like James Chasse function in the world.

Jim Jim was part of our world, and given that, we have a responsibility to honor and respect the individual. Our versus his, or us versus them, are not paradigms in 21st Century USA, and Brian Lindstrom plays out that criticism through the people he interviewed and the narrative flow of his powerful film. Unfortunately, police departments, jailers and prison authorities, and now ICE against undocumented immigrants believe that the men and women with the weapons, military gear and new super powers to harass citizens are the “us” and we are the “they.” For people with developmental, psychological and intellectual disabilities, they are at the bottom rung of “humanity” in the minds of many street-level cops.

Lindstrom has spent years confronting the stories of people he says “society kind of puts an X through.” When the audience finishes a film like Alien Boy, we come away as better people in that same collective community, many times with a greater sense of empathy.

For some, it’s not a cakewalk as this filmmaker is challenged to “expose some grit and grace, that otherwise you might not know was there, in the people you may walk by every day.”

The filmmaking involved many sealed documents and gag orders since the city and police bureau were being sued by the Chasse family. “It was an exercise in faith,” he says. “We would just show up and do the work and hope that a way would be revealed.” The floodgates of evidence opened in 2010 when the Chasse family settled for $1.6 million from the City of Portland.

The viewers last week in the homeless veteran shelter where I work asked if things had changed, and some in the audience answered:

“Hell, no. The Portland police have gotten worse. They attack protesters against ICE detention camps. They give me no evidence that they know how to deal with people in mental health crises.”

A bit of a Lindstrom’s biographical underpinning points to a Portland kid who was thinking all the time about stories he wanted to tell, and he came to the conclusion that it was film as a medium to express those narratives.

Lindstrom was the first member of his family to attend college, paying for this education at both University of Oregon and then Lewis & Clark University by working summers at a salmon cannery in Cordova, Alaska. A linchpin to Brian’s transformation into believing he would be a filmmaker occurred when communications professor Stuart Kaplan screened Edward R. Murrow’s 1960 documentary, Harvest of Shame, about the hard lives American migrant farmworkers faced producing America’s food.

“Brian was really captivated by that, and thought that that’s the kind of thing he would like to do,” Kaplan says. “Documentaries that could bring about social change.”

After graduating from Lewis & Clark, Lindstrom got into Columbia University’s film directing program, where he produced educational videos for the New York City Department of Transportation. His thesis films included a short drama adapted from a Charles Baxter short story and a five-minute documentary about the famous schoolyard basketball player Earl “The Goat” Manigault.

Brian Lindstrom

He’s connected to the NW Film School, and he’s worked with one of my old stomping grounds, Central City Concern, a Portland nonprofit that provides housing, health care, and addiction-treatment services. The fruit of his labor includes Kicking, a half-hour documentary that follows three drug addicts through the medically supervised detox process at Central City’s Hooper Detox Center, and then Finding Normal, about CCC’s Mentor program, where recovering drug addicts get housing and a peer mentor to bust the cycle of addiction, sobriety, relapse.

Today, Lindstrom works intently on other projects while also spending time with his two children and wife, writer Cheryl Strayed, author of the best-selling memoir, Wild, which was turned into a Hollywood film.

My quick mini-interview of Alien Boy‘s Brian Lindstrom:

Paul Haeder: What’s the lesson you take away in 2018 after making the film Alien Boy, and after the screenings, the interviews, the passage of time from that 2006 killing?

Brian Lindstrom: We need to do more to support and protect people dealing with mental illness. I naively thought, way back in 2013 when we were finishing Alien Boy, that the Justice Dept. would come in and make everything better. That hasn’t happened. I want to think the opening of Unity is a step in the right direction and takes pressure off of PPB in terms of dealing with people in mental health crises, but evidently there are some issues at Unity that need to be worked out. I want to be clear that just because I’m advocating for anything that takes the burden off of PPB dealing with people with mental illness, I am in no way condoning or excusing what the PPB did to James Chasse. What is clear to me is that we have to figure out a way to support and protect people with mental illness so that PPB isn’t the defacto mental health services provider.

PH: You make documentaries. What influence do you want these films to have on audiences? The old conundrum is as artists who cover social/environmental/cultural/community injustices we get both the 35,000 foot perspective and the two inch POV, yet in the back of our minds we say, “Shit nothing has changed … in fact, it’s worse.” Riff with this in terms specifically with how you see not only PPB dealing with people they come in contact with living with mental health diagnoses, but writ large in the USA?

BL: I have a confession to make. If I’m truly honest with myself, I don’t make films for audiences. I make them for the people in the film. It is my small way of honoring them. That doesn’t mean I don’t delve into dark areas or that I ignore that person’s struggles. I’m much more concerned with trying to achieve an honest depiction of that person’s life than I am with any potential audience reaction.

PH: Why do you focus on the subject matter you have thus chosen in your documentarian body of work?

BL: It chooses me. I don’t know how else to explain it.

PH: Which story that hasn’t been told but for which you would like to see be told by anyone, or you yourself?

BL: Hmm… So many. I will go with the first that comes to mind: I’ve always wanted to make a documentary about an adult overcoming illiteracy.

PH: What advice do you give young or nascent filmmakers who want to make a difference and tell those stories that might spark a difference in our world?

BL: Grab a camera and go for it. Learn to get out of the way of the story.

PH: Anything you learned in the making of Alien Boy that you have just come to grips with?

BL: We must keep fighting for those whom life has dealt a hard hand.

PH: Why do you make documentaries?

BL: The camera is a bridge of sorts that allows me to get to know people I otherwise might never get to meet. I’m forever grateful for the brave people who have let me tell their story.

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